tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19748938466409787692023-11-15T23:02:25.941-08:00daggatt blog"Enjoy every sandwich"
- Warren ZevonUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-92045609108026127402010-03-30T12:53:00.001-07:002010-03-30T19:33:46.807-07:00the health care myths continue<span style="font-family:arial;">I get a lot of right-wing emails. A large part of that is because of these posts. Friends send my posts to their right-wing friends or relatives (whom I refer to generically as “your right-wing brother-in-law”) and either the friend or his or her right-wing brother-in-law sends me his response. Then I get on his right-wing email distribution list and … they pour in. I read them so you don’t have to.<br /><br />Based on years of this, and countless right-wing emails, I can make a few generalizations: </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">1/ They usually allege something factual that is an OUTRAGE. The odds are overwhelming (90+%) that the alleged “facts” are not true. Therefore you should always assume they are untrue unless or until you get them verified from a source you know from direct, personal experience to be reliable. But given the remote likelihood that they are true, it really isn’t worth spending much time attempting to determine that with certainty. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">2/ Your right-wing brother-in-law doesn’t really care in the least that they are untrue and time spent trying to convince him of their falsity will never cause him to question either his opinions or the veracity of future right-wing emails. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">3/ The likely veracity of the email is inversely related to the number of exclamation points or other expressions of OUTRAGE. The more OUTRAGEOUS the more certain you can be that the email is untrue. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">4/ If the email concludes by telling you to send it to everyone you know, the odds of it being untrue are approximately 100%.<br /><br />As the health care “debate” played out over the past year, there were all manner of viral lies about “death panels” and “free health care for illegal immigrants” and a “federal takeover of health care” and all manner of other things (spread not exclusively or even primarily by email but by FOX News and prominent Republican politicians who, like your right-wing brother-in-law, never really cared whether the stuff they were spouting was true). But until there was actually a bill signed into law, it was hard to definitively disprove all those allegations. That is one of the reasons why it was so important politically for Democrats not to abandon their effort at health care reform. Had the effort failed, the “health care bill” would have lived forever in right-wing mythology (and, eventually, the political conventional wisdom) as all those things it was alleged to be. Since it would have never actually come into existence, it would forever be everything its opponents claimed it was.<br /><br />Now that health care reform has been signed into law, the right-wing myths haven’t stopped. But it becomes much easier to refute them or at least challenge them. If nothing else, it is now easier to ask, “Given that this is all about private health insurance to obtain medical care through private providers, where is the ‘government takeover” part?” Or, “Point out to me what in this new law is going to result in unplugging granny or free health care for illegal immigrants or health care provided through government ministries.” Or, “What parts of the new law do you want to repeal?”<br /><br />That said, let me respond to a few of the myths that already seem to have gone viral.<br /><br />First, let’s note a couple of general points. This law was endorsed by the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the American Nurses Association, the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association and just about every other mainstream health policy organization. It was modeled on the </span><a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">1993 Republican alternative</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to the Clinton plan, the popular and successful 2006 </span><a href="http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.27/859.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Romney plan</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in Massachusetts, and the Bob Dole/Howard Baker/Tom Daschle </span><a href="http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/news/press-releases/2009/12/former-senate-majority-leaders-baker-daschle-and-dole-commend-senate-pas"><span style="font-family:arial;">Bipartisan Policy Center proposal</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. It can fairly be described as a “centrist Republican approach” (admittedly, the “centrist Republican” has, itself, become a mythical creature).<br /><br />Claims that health care reform is “Armageddon … that will ruin our country” (the </span><a href="http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/03/20/boehner-its-armageddon-health-care-bill-will-ruin-our-country/"><span style="font-family:arial;">actual words</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of House minority leader Boehner) do not seem to be shared by the financial markets.<br /><br />As of March 2, Intrade priced the odds of health care passing at 30%:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13mkt4INaRjy5gGIHBNNXfvjTdg3lcJhtO0ya6AnUAketDtRr7su_sJUeysC785HE9P5plby1yJL0Y1U8lfdmdwTGMkjnTx0_fwJYyyoshojtxTdpyJvEDJhKEKU4vbRHb5NQ1ic6YXA/s1600/intrade.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5454517651035194770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 173px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13mkt4INaRjy5gGIHBNNXfvjTdg3lcJhtO0ya6AnUAketDtRr7su_sJUeysC785HE9P5plby1yJL0Y1U8lfdmdwTGMkjnTx0_fwJYyyoshojtxTdpyJvEDJhKEKU4vbRHb5NQ1ic6YXA/s400/intrade.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><br />So presumably the equity markets had not priced in passage of the health care bill, even fairly recently.<br /><br />On March 2, </span><a title="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=" href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EGSPC&a=02&b=2&c=2010&d=02&e=30&f=2010&g=d" a="02&b=" c="2010&d=" e="28&f=" g="d"><span style="font-family:arial;">the S&P 500</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> was 1118. It closed today at 1173, up 4.9%. The market has also been up since passage of the bill. So for all the right wing talk of Armageddon, the markets don't seem to share that view. At worst, they shrugged. At best, they viewed it as a positive development. Sure, you can say that there were other things going on in the US economy in recent weeks that might have had a bearing on equity prices. (Some, like a </span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/perspective-on-interest-rates/"><span style="font-family:arial;">slight uptick in interest rates</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, would tend to drive equity prices lower.) But if health care reform was going to fundamentally, negatively alter one-sixth (or more) of the US economy, it is reasonable to assume that would be discounted in the prices of equities.<br /><br />OK, now let’s go to some of the specific myths that have been circulating.<br /><br /><u>Myth #1:</u><br /><br />There has been a lot of hype around the announcement by AT&T that it was taking a $1 billion charge against earnings this quarter because of the health care reform law. Caterpillar says it will be taking a $100 million charge. Deere and 3M are also taking charges. Rupert Murdoch, through the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page, is, as usual, leading the charge on this issue. In an editorial entitled “</span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703312504575141642402986422.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">ObamaCare Day One: Companies are already warning about higher health-care costs</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">,” Murdoch’s minion’s claim these charges reflect an increase in costs “this year alone” and are "a small measure of the destruction that will be churned out by the rewrite of health, tax, labor and welfare laws that is ObamaCare, and only the vanguard of much worse to come." How, you might ask, could these charges reflect an increase in costs “this year alone” when most provisions don’t take effect until 2014 and even most of those that take effect this year don’t kick in until late September? The answer, of course, is that these charges have nothing to do with costs “this year” – the <em>Journal’</em>s editorial board is, as usual, making stuff up.<br /><br />I have already received a few right-wing emails on this subject and today even the <em>New York Times</em> picks up the issue in an article entitled, “</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/30subsidy.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Companies Push Repeal Provision of Health Law</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” – a classic example of “he said/she said” journalism. So what’s the scoop on this supposed big increase in corporate health care costs?<br /><br />Back in 2003, George W. Bush and the Republican Congress passed the Medicare Part D program, a </span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/part-d-revisited/"><span style="font-family:arial;">$10 trillion unfunded liability</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that extends prescription drug coverage to seniors on Medicare. There was concern that with Medicare now offering this prescription drug coverage some companies might drop it from the health care benefits they are already offering their retirees and dump the cost of the federal government. So the Republican Congress gave them a kickback – a subsidy equal to 28% of the cost of a company’s retiree drug benefits – equal to around $1300/year per retiree on average. Not only did the companies get the subsidy, but they didn’t have to report it as income. But here is the really cool part: They also got to deduct the subsidy as an expense. That’s right. The federal government gives them money and the companies get to deduct it as an expense. In normal accounting, an expense is something you PAY not something you RECEIVE.<br /><br />In retrospect, that looked pretty dodgy. So as part of the health care reform act, Congressional Democrats ended the tax deduction. They didn’t end the subsidy. And they didn’t make it taxable. They only ended the tax deduction for the tax-free subsidy. Yes, folks, this is the new Republican/Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street Journal/right wing rallying cry: “It is an OUTRAGE to take away the tax deduction that big companies get for their tax-free government handout.”<br /><br />Federal officials estimate that eliminating the tax deduction will raise around $4.5 billion in revenue over ten years. That is roughly the same amount that the health care legislation provides in additional subsidies for companies that maintain retiree health plans. In other words, it's a wash. And the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives, has estimated, “that health care reform will reduce insurance cost trends for businesses by more than $3000 for each employee over the next 10 years.”<br /><br />So if ending this bogus deduction only raises $4.5 billion over ten years, how does just one company, AT&T, end up with a $1 billion write down in just one quarter? Good question. I suggest some enterprising reporter delve more deeply into their accounting. Presumably they are claiming that this is the actuarial value of that tax deduction in perpetuity discounted back to the present. That means that the undiscounted tax benefit would have had to be several billion dollars which doesn’t appear to be consistent with the estimated increase in federal revenue. And since when do companies capitalize the benefit of tax loopholes? I suspect that there is a lot more going on with these write offs – like using “ObamaCare” as an excuse to belatedly fix some wildly unrealistic assumptions in their pension accounting.<br /><br />But I digress.<br /><br />That is all too much to expect the average misinformed <em>Wall Street Journal</em> reader to discover. All they know (or think they know) is that ObamaCare is bankrupting corporate America (despite the fact that investors appear to believe that the earning power of corporate America is undiminished).<br /><br /><u>Myth #2:</u><br /><br />Another myth that’s going around is that the IRS will be hiring 16,000 agents in order to enforce ObamaCare. George Will even spouted it on ABC’s <em>This Week</em> on Sunday. After dismissing his co-panelist Paul Krugman as someone who received a Nobel Prize “in economics, not practical Washington wisdom,” Will showed his own “Washington wisdom” by </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/29/george-will-krugman-nobel/"><span style="font-family:arial;">claiming</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: “One of the ways that this simple, workable legislation is going to be made to work is the IRS is going to hire about 16,000 new agents.” Apparently this bogus claim started with a </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/26/irs-health/"><span style="font-family:arial;">press release</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> from a Republican Congressman from Texas citing Republican staffers as his source. It was quickly picked up by the right-wing noise machine (complete with </span><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/22/irs-looking-to-hiring-thousands-of-armed-tax-agents-to-enforce-health-care-laws/"><span style="font-family:arial;">pictures of soldiers in battle gear</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) and then carried over into the mainstream media and stated as fact by shills like George Will. You probably won’t be surprised to find out that it isn’t true. The IRS Commissioner </span><a href="http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2010/03/the_irs_will_no.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">refuted it</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on March 25th. </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;">At year end, employers and insurance companies will send out evidence of insurance coverage just as they send out W2 and 1099 forms today. Taxpayers will attach those to their tax returns and that will be the end of it. The IRS has no intentions of going beyond that to verify coverage.<br /><br />Don’t tell anyone, but the fun little secret of the individual health care mandate is that it </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/how_does_the_individual_mandat.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">really doesn’t have any teeth</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Penalties are low and if someone refuses to pay, the law specifically says that no criminal penalties or liens can be imposed. Soldiers in battle gear won’t be bursting through your door. Fortunately, the experience in Massachusetts suggests that the individual mandate encourages most people to buy insurance even if would make economic sense for them to just pay the penalty … or to refuse to pay it altogether. With something like </span><a href="http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=1001315"><span style="font-family:arial;">$300 billion a year in tax evasion</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, the IRS has bigger concerns than whether or not you buy health insurance.<br /><br /><u>Myth #3:</u><br /><br />I have received this viral email at least a dozen times. I bet you have too (if not, you probably will). It is the “proposed 28th Amendment” to the Constitution that would require that all laws apply to members of Congress. Here is a bit of it: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Subject: An idea whose time has come<br /></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they didn't pay into Social Security, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being considered...in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop. This is a good way to do that. It is an idea whose time has come.</span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Have each person contact a minimum of Twenty people on their Address list, in turn ask each of those to do likewise. </span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">In three days, most people in The United States of America will<br />have the message. This is one proposal that really should be passed around. </span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: </span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States."</span> </p></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">Note that bit about sending it to 20 people. Not quite as strong as telling you to send it to everyone you know, but probably more effective by making the task more specific and manageable. In any event, it’s a sure tip-off that the thing is bogus.<br /><br />So here are the </span><a href="http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/28thamendment.asp"><span style="font-family:arial;">facts</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br />FACT: Members of Congress are NOT exempt from paying into Social Security.<br />FACT: Members of Congress are NOT exempt from any other laws of general applicability (including any dealing with sexual harassment).<br /></span><a href="http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/congresspay.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">FACT</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: Members of Congress CANNOT retire after only one term with their full Congressional salary. Members of Congress make $174,000 year and receive the same retirement benefits as other federal workers (for which they pay in 1.3% if their salary in addition to the 6.2% Social Security tax). Members of Congress do not begin vesting rights until they have served for five years and are not eligible for a pension until they've completed 20 years of service or after they reach the age of 62. According to the Congressional Research Service, as of October 1, 2006, 413 retired Members of Congress were receiving federal pensions based fully or in part on their congressional service and their average pension was $35,592.<br /><br />And, specifically with regard to the new health care reform act, </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/notes/congressman-jim-oberstar/congress-not-exempt-from-health-insurance-exchanges/368125257083"><span style="font-family:arial;">Section 1312</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> explicitly provides that the only health care plans that may be offered to members of Congress and their staff are those provided on the new exchanges set up under the law. So not only are Members of Congress and their staff not exempted from the law, they are the only Americans who will explicitly lose their existing employer-provided health insurance and be required to get their insurance through the new exchanges.<br /><br />These aren’t the only “myths” (a polite way of saying “lies”) about the health care reform act going around. And I’m sure there will a lot more. The problem with these myths is that they are potentially limitless. There is literally no limit to the stuff people can just make up. But it takes time to refute them (and some, by their nature, cannot be definitely disproved – like how to you “prove” what’s not in a bill that hasn’t even been written?). At some point you would think that they would undermine the credibility of those who propagate them. (But, then, that would assume that falsity is a “bug” rather than a “feature” with these things.)<br /><br />On a lighter note, let me end with some </span><a href="http://dhole.livejournal.com/174768.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">further health care myths</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;"><strong>Some myths about the current healthcare bill explained.</strong> </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">There's been a lot of talk about this lately, so I figured that I'd clear up a few common misconceptions people seem to have about the recently passed Health Care Reform bill.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 1: With the passage of HCR, bears will be allowed to roam hospitals, devouring those patients too sick to hide or flee.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: </span><span style="font-family:georgia;">FALSE</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The ursine provisions of the health care bill remain controversial with the AMA and other organizations, but, basically, all they do is recognize that in some rural areas, particularly in the Dakotas and Alaska, bears have been acting as health care professionals for decades, and puts them into the category of other alternative health professionals, such as acupuncturists, osteopaths, and killer bees. Bear attacks may be available under some health plans, but those treatments are entirely at the discretion of the insurers.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 2: MRIs are once again to be termed "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Images", and once again, a small percentage of those undergoing this procedure will gain super-powers that will allow them to perform great feats, at a cost to their humanity.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: FALSE</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">While this provision was included in earlier versions of the bill, it was dropped in the face of a strong opposition by Senator Keene and others.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 3: ObamaNaziSocialismAntichristApocolpyseRevalations4:15SicSemperTyranisTaxedEnoguhAlready!</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: That's not a myth, that's a bunch of words, some of which are misspelled.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 4: A provision of the HCR bill calls to the Lord Above, to send down a dove, with beak as sharp as razors, to cut the throats of them there blokes, what sells bad beer to sailors.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: Partially true.While this language does exist in the current version of the bill, it is unlikely to stand judicial scrutiny, as it will probably be seen as a violation of the separation of church and state. However, this is merely echoing faith-based programs enacted by individual states. The dove attacks on campus area bars selling Rolling Rock to University of West Florida Argonauts, for instance, can only be applauded, as Rolling Rock is swill.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 5: In order to pay for the mandates of this bill, President Obama has traded the treasury of the United States for a handful of magic beans.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: FALSE</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Only one government-owned cow was traded for these beans, which have already more than earned back the initial investment. Also, since the treasury of the US currently contains less than negative fourteen trillion dollars, wouldn't you want to trade it, for just about anything?</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Myth 6: The HCR bill will allow communists control of our vital bodily fluids.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Status: TRUE</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Yeah, this one is totally real. But, to be fair, there aren't that many communists<br />left, and those that there are don't actually want that many bags full of lymph and phlegm. </span></p></blockquote></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-6248071707040367222010-03-25T12:46:00.000-07:002010-03-29T09:52:51.756-07:00the bipartisan health care reform law<span style="font-family:arial;">I agree with Vice President Biden that this week's enactment of historic health care reform legislation was </span><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100325/pl_afp/uspoliticsbidenobama"><span style="font-family:arial;">a big ... er, deal</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. It's an achievement the whole country should be proud of.</span><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">In my post last week ("</span><a title="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/03/president-romneys-first-year.html" href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/03/president-romneys-first-year.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">president romney's first year</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">"), I imaged a parallel universe where Mitt Romney won the 2008 presidential election and how the policies and performance of President Obama's first year might have been perceived had they been those of Romney instead. As it turns out, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong had </span><a title="http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/201077/The_curious_triumph_of_RomneyCare" href="http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/201077/The_curious_triumph_of_RomneyCare"><span style="font-family:arial;">the same thought</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Over in that alternative branch of the quantum-mechanical multiverse in which Mitt Romney was elected President in November 2008, this health-care bill ... passed the House of Representatives 352-83 and passed the Senate 79-20, with near-solid Republican support. Left-wing Democrats whined that it was not real<br />reform. The David Broders and David Brookses of the world trumpeted it as an<br />extraordinary victory for American bipartisanship.<br /><br />Instead, we are here -- where a nearly identical plan appears very, very<br />different.<br /><br />We truly live in a weird world.<br /></span></blockquote><br />DeLong has lately taken to calling the new health care reform law "RomneyCare" to highlight the fact that the health care reform bill that President Obama signed into law this week follows the same basic contours as Mitt Romney's successful and popular Massachusetts plan (</span><a title="http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.27/859.html" href="http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.27/859.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">you can read a good history of that plan here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). <br /><br />It is basically the same plan that </span><a title="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx" href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">Republican's proposed as an alternative to the Clinton health care plan in 1993</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (follow that link for a good comparison of the '93 plan with the new law).<br /><br />In other words, Democrats just passed the Republican health care reform plan -- without a single Republican vote.<br /><br />Bear in mind, the bill that was signed into law this week was endorsed by the AMA (which has never before supported any health care reform effort), the AARP (I'm pretty sure they're not out to "kill granny"), the American Hospital Association, the American Nurses Association, the Catholic Health Association, a group representing 59,000 Catholic nuns, and way too many other groups to list. But it didn't get a <em><strong>single</strong></em> Republican vote out of 198 Republicans in the House and 41 Republican Senators.<br /><br />Among those who helped </span><a title="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5330854"><span style="font-family:arial;">design the Romney plan</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> was the conservative Heritage Foundation. It's principal architect was MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who also advised the Obama administration. Although Republicans are now decrying the "individual mandate," it was the centerpiece of Romney's "Personal Responsibility" plan. Here he is in a </span><a title="http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=" href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008213"><span style="font-family:arial;">2006 <em>Wall Street Journal</em> op-ed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> touting his new law:</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote>... I proposed that everyone must either purchase a product of their choice or demonstrate that they can pay for their own health care. It's a personal responsibility principle.<br /><br />Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian. </blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">T</span><span style="font-family:arial;">he Romney plan </span><a title="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000147-503544.html" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000147-503544.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">also covers abortions</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. (</span><a title="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/22/randy-neugebauer-revealed_n_508525.html" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/22/randy-neugebauer-revealed_n_508525.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Babykiller!!</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">)<br /><br />This week Republicans have taken up the theme that the individual mandate is not just bad policy ... but unconstitutional. Among those leading the torch-and-pitchfork crowd against President Obama's health care act is none other than ... Romney himself, who on Monday called the bill that garnered 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House, "</span><a title="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=" href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzgyMzA1NWUwNjA5OTg2ZTUzMTliYzQyOTM1ZmIzNTI"><span style="font-family:arial;">an unconscionable abuse of power</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">." Romney has also joined the Republican chorus </span><a title="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/03/romney_health_care_bill_will_cost_obama_2nd_term.php" href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/03/romney_health_care_bill_will_cost_obama_2nd_term.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">claiming the act is unconstitutional</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> -- although he has so far </span><a title="http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/24/romney-larry-king/" href="http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/24/romney-larry-king/"><span style="font-family:arial;">inartfully dodged all questions</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on whether the thinks the individual mandate is constitutional. But that is the focus of the Republican attorneys general of 13 states (including </span><a title="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011422101_mckenna24m.html" href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011422101_mckenna24m.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Washington State's ambitious Republican attorney general</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) who this week filed a lawsuit claiming the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Most serious legal scholars consider that suit nothing more than frivilous partisan grandstanding -- unless the current radical majority on the Supreme Court decides to overturn a few generations of court precedent (as they did in the </span><a title="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/01/26/82982/commentary-citizens-united-is.html" href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/01/26/82982/commentary-citizens-united-is.html"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Citizen's United</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> case that overturned a century of restrictions on corporate money in our electoral system). Republicans apparently were against "judicial activism" and "frivilous lawsuits" before they were for them. <br /><br />Among the current Republican senators who co-sponsored the 1993 Republican alternative, which included an individual mandate, are Kit Bond (R-MO), Robert Bennett (R-UT), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Richard Lugar (R-IN), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Republican Senators who have </span><a title="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/the-republicans-who-supported-an-individual-mandate/37915/" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/the-republicans-who-supported-an-individual-mandate/37915/"><span style="font-family:arial;">co-sponsored another bill</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> built around an individual insurance mandate include Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Judd Gregg (R-NH), and Lamar Alexander (R-TN). And Olympia Snowe (R-ME) actually voted for the Senate bill in committee. Apparently, all were for a Romney-style "Personal Responsiblity" plan before it became an unconstitutional OUTRAGE.<br /><br />The plan that was passed into law this week is also essentially the same as the proposal put forth last summer by the the </span><a title="http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/news/press-releases/2009/12/former-senate-majority-leaders-baker-daschle-and-dole-commend-senate-pas" href="http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/news/press-releases/2009/12/former-senate-majority-leaders-baker-daschle-and-dole-commend-senate-pas"><span style="font-family:arial;">bipartisan Bob Dole/Howard Baker/Tom Daschle group</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. As Jonathan Cohn </span><a title="http://www.tnr.com/article/health-care/party-is-such-sweet-sorrow" href="http://www.tnr.com/article/health-care/party-is-such-sweet-sorrow"><span style="font-family:arial;">describes it</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote>Earlier [last] year, a group of former Senate majority leaders--Republicans Howard Baker and Bob Dole, along with Democrats Tom Daschle and George Mitchell--showed how that might be accomplished. After negotiating with each other for more than a year, as if they were still in office and representing their two parties, the group (minus Mitchell, who had since joined the administration) unveiled a fully fledged health care reform proposal in June. They released it through the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank they’d establish precisely to advance proposals like these. And, at least on paper, it looked like the kind of scheme members of both parties could support in good conscience.<br /><br />The Center’s proposal had the same basic architecture as the plan Obama put forward in his presidential campaign and that congressional committees have been debating this year. Everybody would have to get insurance; in exchange, government would make sure everybody could get insurance, by subsidizing the cost for those who needed financial assistance--and by creating a marketplace in which people without access to employer policies could get coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions.</blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The major point of departure between the various Republican plans and Democratic proposals earlier in this process had been the inclusion of a "public option" in the Democratic plans. But as we all know, the public option was dropped along the way (thanks, primarily, to Joe Liebermann and Ben Nelson). So, as it turns out, the bill that passed Congress was actually <em>more conservative</em> than the Dole/Baker/Daschle plan, which included state-based public options and a triggered public option at the federal level:</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Instead of a single public-insurance plan into which people could enroll, the Center’s proposal would have given states the option of creating independent insurance plans to compete with private insurers; it allowed the federal government to step in with its own plan only if, after five years, there was evidence the system needed more competition. </span></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Yes, former Republican Senate leaders Dole and Baker were willing to go further than Congressional Democrats. Who knew Dole and Baker were totalitarian socialists?<br /><br />Now <em><strong>repealing</strong></em> health care reform is joining taxes, abortions, guns and gays among the list of Republican "lithmus tests." But as people learn what is really in the new law (e.g., no "death panels", "free health care for illegal immigrants" or "federal funding of abortion") they are finding out that there are a lot of pretty cool things in the bill.<br /><br />Among the provisions that kick in this year: </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">NO DISCRIMINATON AGAINST CHILDREN WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Prohibits health insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Effective 6 months after enactment. (Beginning in 2014, this prohibition would apply to all persons.)<br /><br />ENDS RESCISSIONS: Bans insurance companies from dropping people from coverage when they get sick. Effective 6 months after enactment.<br /><br />EXTENDS COVERAGE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE UP TO 26TH BIRTHDAY THROUGH PARENTS INSURANCE - Requires health plans to allow young people up to their 26th birthday to remain on their parents insurance policy, at the parents choice. Effective 6 months after enactment.<br /><br />SMALL BUSINESS TAX CREDITS: Offers tax credits to small businesses to make employee coverage more affordable. Tax credits of up to 35 percent of premiums will be immediately available to firms that choose to offer coverage. Effective beginning for calendar year 2010. (Beginning in 2014, the small business tax credits will cover 50 percent of premiums.)<br /><br />BEGINS TO CLOSE THE Medicare Part D Donut Hole: Provides a $250 rebate to Medicare beneficiaries who hit the donut hole in 2010. Effective for calendar year 2010. (Beginning in 2011, institutes a 50% discount on brand-name drugs in the donut hole; also completely closes the donut hole by 2020.)<br /><br />NEW, INDEPENDENT APPEALS PROCESS: Ensures consumers in new plans have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal decisions by their health insurance plan. Effective 6 months after enactment.<br /><br />ENSURING VALUE FOR PREMIUM PAYMENTS: Requires plans in the individual and small group market to spend 80 percent of premium dollars on medical services, and plans in the large group market to spend 85 percent. Insurers that do not meet these thresholds must provide rebates to policyholders. Effective on January 1, 2011.<br /><br />IMMEDIATE HELP FOR THE THOSE WITH PREXISTING CONDITIONS (INTERIM HIGH-RISK POOL): Provides immediate access to insurance for Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition - through a temporary high-risk pool. Effective 90 days after enactment.<br /><br />COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS: Increases funding for Community Health Centers to allow for nearly a doubling of the number of patients seen by the centers over the next 5 years. Effective beginning in fiscal year 2010.<br /><br />INCREASING NUMBER OF PRIMARY CARE DOCTORS: Provides new investment in training programs to increase the number of primary care doctors, nurses, and public health professionals. Effective beginning in fiscal year 2010.</span></blockquote><br />And that is not even remotely a comprehensive list.<br /><br />Given all the popular stuff in the act, it's not surprising that some Republicans are already starting to back away from calls for total repeal (except when talking to their crazy base and the tea party crowd). Yesterday,Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things. We are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction."<br /></span></blockquote><br />So now Republicans, like Cornyn, are FOR the really popular stuff, like the ban on preexisting condition exclusions. Their argument is with all the "other stuff" (for example, how you go about paying for it -- Republicans don't like to pay for our government). But all the "other stuff" flows from the ban on preexisting conditions.<br /><br />If you say the sick can't be excluded from the insurance market, then people will just wait until they get sick to buy insurance. That will make insurance more expensive and cause more healthy people to drop their insurance, which will further raise rates and cause more healthy people to drop out, further raising rates, in what is known as the "insurance death spiral." That's why if you eliminate preexisting conditions, you have to include an individual mandate -- what Mitt Romney called "personal responsibility" when he was selling his Massachusetts plan. And if there's a mandate, there needs to be tax subsidies to make sure people can afford what they're being required to buy (just like in Massachusetts). And then of course, you need to define what they're being required to buy, and so you get minimum benefit regulations. <br /><br />There you have it -- the basic structure of the health care reform that just passed Congress. It also happens to be the approach to health care reform that has long been advocated by Republicans as an alternative to a single-payer system (like the hugely popular Medicare system which </span><a title="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/05/mccain-medicare-recon/" href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/05/mccain-medicare-recon/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Republicans now consider sacrosanct </span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">-- except when they are </span><a title="http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/07/29/medicare-44/" href="http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/07/29/medicare-44/"><span style="font-family:arial;">trying to kill it</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) or other more government-oriented approaches. Near universal coverage achieved entirely through private insurance companies and private health care providers. Just like RomneyCare and the 1993 Republican plan.<br /><br />But, of course, everyone knows what's been going on here. Republicans have been very open about it. Their lock-step obstructionism was never driven by the specifics of the health care reform plan -- or the details of any other particular legislation. It started in the very first days of the Obama administration -- at a time of a national economic crisis. The <em>New York Times</em> last week had a good piece on </span><a title="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.html" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Senate Republican leader McConnell's strategy of obstruction</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.<br />...<br />In the process, Mr. McConnell, 68, a Kentuckian more at home plotting tactics in the cloakroom than writing legislation in a committee room or exhorting crowds on the campaign trail, has come to embody a kind of oppositional politics that critics say has left voters cynical about Washington, the Senate all but dysfunctional and the Republican Party without a positive agenda or message.<br /><br />But in the short run at least, his approach has worked. ...<br /><br />On the major issues — not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others — Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it. He has helped energize the Republican base, expose divisions among Democrats and turn the health care fight into a test of the Democrats’ ability to govern.<br />...<br />The strategy that has brought Senate Republicans where they are today began when they gathered, beaten and dispirited, at the Library of Congress two weeks before Mr. Obama’s inauguration. They had lost seven seats in November, another was teetering, and they were about to go up against an extraordinarily popular new president and an emboldened Democratic Congress.<br />...<br />As the year went on, Mr. McConnell spent hours listening to the worries and ideas of Republicans, urging them not to be seduced by the attention-grabbing possibilities of cutting a bipartisan deal. “I think the reason my members are feeling really good,” he said, “is they believe that the reward for playing team ball this year was the reversal of the political environment and the possibility that we will have a bigger team next year.”<br />...<br />Mr. McConnell is credited with a very effective run over the last 15 months — though being minority leader has distinct advantages over being in charge of making the Senate function.<br /><br />“Throwing grenades is easier than catching them,” acknowledged Senator John Thune of South Dakota, a fellow member of the Republican leadership.</span><br /></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">McConnell's stategy has been effective because many voters (aided by media coverage that treats all policy debate like a sporting event) base their judgments on whether a policy is reasonable by the level of bipartisan support. Lock-step partisan opposition sends the signal that legislation is extreme. As McConnell explained in the <em>New York Times</em> piece:</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public.</span></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">McConnell made the same point to </span><a title="http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100320_9241.php" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100320_9241.php" jquery1269296344812="90"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>National Journal</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>:</em></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Then as the year unfolded -- whether it became the stimulus, the budget, Guantanamo, health care -- what I tried to do and what John [Boehner] did very skillfully, as well, was to unify our members in opposition to it. Had we not done that, I don't think the public would have been as appalled as they became ... Public opinion can change, but it is affected by what elected officials do. Our reaction to what they were doing had a lot to do with how the public felt about it. Republican unity in the House and Senate has been the major contributing factor to shifting American public<br />opinion.</span></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Democratic attempts to craft bipartisan legislation, by definition, cannot succeed as long as Republican opposition is unified. So Democrats could adopt RomneyCare or the 1993 Republican health care alternative, and Republicans who co-sponsored that earlier bill would still vote against it -- making it, by definition, a partisan Democratic bill. Or they could enact the </span><a title="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/02/12/is-obama-stimulus-plan-also-the-biggest-tax-cut-ever.html" href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/02/12/is-obama-stimulus-plan-also-the-biggest-tax-cut-ever.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">largest two-year tax cut in US history</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, and every Repubolican would still vote against it -- making it partisan Democratic legislation. Or they could attempt to set up a bipartisan deficit reduction commission, and </span><a title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013101837.html" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013101837.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">seven Republican co-sponsors would still vote to successfully filibuster it</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. And then Republicans accuse Democrats of enacting partisan legislation. Or, if the Demcrats are unable to overcome the opposition, they are accused of being ineffective. So far, that strategy seems to have been working for Republicans (if not the American people).<br /><br />Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) </span><a title="http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0709/Health_reform_foes_plan_Obamas_Waterloo.html?showall" href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0709/Health_reform_foes_plan_Obamas_Waterloo.html?showall"><span style="font-family:arial;">famously said</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> early in the health care process, "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." The goal was to "break" the Obama presidency. Had they succeeded in defeating health care reform, they would have done so. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">On the other hand, if they had sought to get a bill more to their liking, they could have easily achieved that goal. President Obama was desperate for <em><strong>any</strong></em> Republican support. Senate Finance Committee chairman Baucus, with President Obama's encouragement, went to ridiculous lengths over months to get Republican support, even long after those with whom he was dealing, like Chuck Grassley, were picking up the "killing granny" and "free health care for illegal immigrants" themes and otherwise making it clear they weren't going to break with their party's obstruction. In return for even half a dozen Republican votes, Democrats almost certainly would have agreed to gut their bill. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">That was especially true after the Massachusetts election when Congressional Democrats were running for the hills and even President Obama was making noises about a scaled down effort. Had Republicans come up some kind of pathetic, soggy, half a loaf, defeatist Democrats would have jumped at it. Even if it only succeeded in dividing the Democratic caucus, it would have killed the bill. But, as it turns out, Republican insistence on total defeat of the health care reform effort, with no compromises, ended up leaving Democrats with no option other than to go ahead with the bill that had passed the Senate with 60 votes on Christmas Eve.<br /><br />Former Bush speechwriter, David Frum, has been among those faulting Republicans for their strategy on health care, saying (in a </span><a title="http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo" href="http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo"><span style="font-family:arial;">widely cited blog post</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) that they ended up creating their own Waterloo. (Matthew Yglesias </span><a title="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/kristol-complicates-napoleon-metaphors.php" href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/kristol-complicates-napoleon-metaphors.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">notes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that the whole "Waterloo" metaphor is historically inapt.) But Frum makes the mistake of assuming the Republican goal was to come up with better health care reform legislation. Rather, the goal was to create partisan division and discredit the Democratic effort. And they largely succeeded at that.<br /><br />Frum also makes the point that Republicans had worked their base into such a crazy rage over the last year that they couldn't back down. How do you compromise with "totalitarianism" or a "socialist takeover of the country" or "death panels"? The Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin crowd is now calling the shots. As Frum </span><a title="http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003230020" href="http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003230020"><span style="font-family:arial;">observed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox."<br /><br />Republicans now seem to be doubling down on the partisan division and obstruction. There is the whole phony "repeal" effort (Republicans would need 67 votes in the Senate to overcome a presidential veto which they couldn't achieve even if they won every Senate seat up this year). Then there is the frivilous litigation challenging the constitutionality of the act. But my favorite is John "Hey Kids Get Off My Grass!" McCain's </span><a title="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/88285-mccain-dont-expect-gop-cooperation-the-rest-of-this-year" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/88285-mccain-dont-expect-gop-cooperation-the-rest-of-this-year"><span style="font-family:arial;">threat</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year." As opposed to all that Republican cooperation before. And what has made McCain more churlish than usual? Democrats overcame a Republican filibuster with 60 votes in the Senate. An OUTRAGE!<br /><br />Jonathan Chait </span><a title="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/vengeance-will-be-mccains" href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/vengeance-will-be-mccains"><span style="font-family:arial;">makes a good point </span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">regarding McCain's threat:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[I]f we believe McCain [and other Republicans], they're saying that there are areas in public policy where Republicans would help make legislative changes that they believe would make the country a better place, but they are refusing to do so out of pique ... In other words, their own claim is that they are deliberately choosing to create suffering -- not merely preventing legislation the Democrats want, but preventing legislation they agree would help people and would otherwise support -- in order to punish the Democrats. This sounds like something the Democrats would accuse them of doing, not something they'd boast about.</span></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">This is the guy whose presidential campaign slogan was "Country First."<br /><br />Senate Republicans are already acting on their threat of total obstruction by invoking an </span><a title="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/the-new-obstruction----gop-tries-to-delay-hearings-and-extend-health-care-debate.php?ref=" href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/the-new-obstruction----gop-tries-to-delay-hearings-and-extend-health-care-debate.php?ref=fpb"><span style="font-family:arial;">obscure Senate rule to prevent any Senate committee meetings from taking place after 2pm</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. (In sympathy with their cause, I call on all Americans to join Senate Republicans by heading home from work every day at 2pm.) Seriously. <br /><br />You couldn't come up with better material for a Gail Collins column if you tried -- and she has a </span><a title="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/opinion/25collins.html" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/opinion/25collins.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">great one today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. As she reminds us:</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[F]eel free to remind Rush Limbaugh that he </span><a title="http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/archives/197198.asp" href="http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/archives/197198.asp"><span style="font-family:georgia;">promised to move to Costa Rica</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"> if health care reform gets implemented. Once you’re done, you can go back and remind him that Costa Rica has national health care.</span> </span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">For that alone, we should all be grateful that health care reform was finally signed into law.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-72737248168146823922010-03-24T13:56:00.000-07:002010-03-24T13:57:24.245-07:00no you can't (featuring john boehner)<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RpOUctySD68&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RpOUctySD68&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-2449544603628278182010-03-16T11:47:00.000-07:002010-03-16T12:04:18.556-07:00president romney's first year<span style="font-family:arial;">In early 2008, the presidential front runner for the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain, suffered a heart attack. Although he recovered fully, he had to drop his presidential bid, leaving the field to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. As it turns out, that was a lucky break for the GOP. When the financial crisis exploded less than two months before the fall election, Romney's business background was just what the country was looking for. While the charismatic young Barack Obama offered change, what the country really sought at that time of great uncertainty was stability and a return to some kind of normalcy. Romney was someone they were confident could handle the economy. They certainly were in no mood for inexperience (let alone some unhinged ideologue like that crazy Alaska governor -- what's-her-name -- who didn't even last one term in a state known for tolerating eccentrics).<br /><br />Even the most bizarre storyline of the long campaign ended up as something of a blessing in disguise for Romney. His first choice for VP, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, was an attempt to reassure the Christian right, which never had much love for the Mormon Romney. But when Sanford's scandalous affair with an Argentine woman broke only days before the Republican convention, Romney quickly pivoted to Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who had been budget director during the first couple of years of the Bush/Cheney administration. The result was the Republican economic "A team" cued up just in time for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.<br /><br />Republicans were fighting a strong headwind after the disastrous Bush/Cheney years, and Democrats increased their Congressional majorities. But the Romney/Daniels team managed to eek out a narrow win based on their perceived economic strengths.<br /><br />And, as things turned out, it's hard to argue with the judgment of the American people. (Although the inauguration wasn't the most thrilling ever -- with the highlight being The Osmonds fresh off their </span><a href="http://www.osmondmania.com/"><span style="font-family:arial;">50th anniversary tour</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />A confident President Romney demonstrated his executive decisiveness by </span><a href="http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-01-09/news/17197407_1_tax-cuts-stimulus-plan-green-energy"><span style="font-family:arial;">swinging into action even before he had been sworn into office</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, proposing a large economic stimulus package. The centerpiece of that package was </span><a href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/02/12/is-obama-stimulus-plan-also-the-biggest-tax-cut-ever.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">the biggest two-year tax cut in US history</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, with the rest roughly equally divided between support for state and local governments and more traditional public works spending. Some Democrats complained that the $787 billion measure was too small and too tilted toward tax cuts, and some Republicans complained that it was too big and didn't include enough tax cuts. President Romney's economic advisors defended the size of the stimulus by noting that it largely just countered the "anti-stimulus" resulting from state and local tax hikes and spending cuts required to offset the effects of the Great Recession on their budgets (with the </span><a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4707"><span style="font-family:arial;">net combined fiscal effect of government actions at all levels close to zero</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). But the need for urgent action during a national crisis muted criticism, as it had after 9-11, and the parties came together quickly in the spirit of national unity. President Romney had been </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/02/14/obama_hails_stimulus_passage_a.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">in office for less than a month</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> when the stimulus passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities.<br /><br />President Romney's strong leadership reassured the financial markets and the crisis, which had threatened to bring down the global financial system, quickly receded. The nations' Gross Domestic Product, which had </span><a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2009/pdf/gdp408f.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">declined at the staggering rate of 6.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> turned around and </span><a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">only a year later was increasing at a 5.9% rate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />Unemployment continued to rise during President Romney's first year in office, peaking at 10% in December of 2009. Some Democrats tried to make an issue of it, but without much success -- and for good reason. The economy lost 779,000 jobs the month President Romney took office and at similar rates for his first couple of months, before his policies kicked in. But the rate of job loss soon began a steady decline. By February of 2009, it had fallen to 36,000 and headed into positive territory thereafter. Everyone agreed that President Romney's economic policies had been a huge success.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6jWlwIqfuwDCZPdLtseUi5ndtKJc80oYjkrfT3PJdOWtmszJAnBaCGGadx-gX81X_0X9R3xYJK67xs5c2RriatoIOdC5NV1ueB7qrA5EByxRpvSEPNGqFm9a_O2A5qgf3dbn9Rxe6j8/s1600-h/romney0004.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449308150688306994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6jWlwIqfuwDCZPdLtseUi5ndtKJc80oYjkrfT3PJdOWtmszJAnBaCGGadx-gX81X_0X9R3xYJK67xs5c2RriatoIOdC5NV1ueB7qrA5EByxRpvSEPNGqFm9a_O2A5qgf3dbn9Rxe6j8/s400/romney0004.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Certainly the financial markets cast their votes for the president. Rather than risk the disruption that might result from bringing in new, inexperienced players in the midst of a global financial crisis, President Romney reassured the markets by reappointing Bush's Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke. And, in a bipartisan gesture, he named as Treasury Secretary former New York Fed Chief Timothy Geithner, who along with Bernanke had acted swiftly and decisively to help rescue the global financial system during the 2008 crisis. President Romney's choice of Geithner was not as odd as it first seemed to many. Geithner got his start working for Kissinger Associates, founded by establishment Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger -- and, of course, the Big K himself. (And, truth be told, is these kinds of establishment Republicans, not the radical religious right, with whom President Romney is really most comfortable.) Geithner's formative government experience was at Treasury in the '90's working to contain financial crises in places like Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia and Russia -- valuable experience at a time when a global financial crisis was threatening another Great Depression in this country. (Excellent profiles of Geithner in </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/15/100315fa_fact_cassidy"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>The New Yorker</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/green-geithner/7992/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>The Atlantic</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />"Don't change horses in the middle of a stream," President Romney said, and the markets agreed. They bottomed out less than two months after he took office, just as his policies began to kick in.<br /><br />By March of 2010, the S&P 500 had risen almost 70 percent from its low and more than 40 percent since President Romney took office. </span><a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTZiZmI5YjQzODljYWVkYTE2MWM4M2M2MDBkZDk0ZTY="><span style="font-family:arial;">As Republicans kept reminding us</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, markets represent the ultimate "spin-free zone" -- where politics and ideology get shoved aside and money talks (</span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/001972/"><span style="font-family:arial;">check out this video clip</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">).<br /><br />Rather than nationalizing the most problematic of the "too-big-to-fail" banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, as a growing consensus of economists seemed to favor at the time, President Romney chose instead to minimize the role of the federal government. His bank "stress tests" succeeded in reassuring private investors and allowed the banking system to attract $140 billion of private capital. As a result, the federal government was able to largely exit from its rescue effort much sooner and at less cost than most experts thought would be possible at the time President Romney took office. A year later, most of the TARP money put into the banks as part of the Bush Bailout had been repaid with interest and it appeared that </span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126015764384079549.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">the ultimate cost of the financial rescue</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> would be less than $150 billion -- about the same as the </span><a href="http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/banking/2000dec/brv13n2_2.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">much smaller savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980's</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (our last experiment in financial deregulation gone awry). Some optimists (e.g., </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/economy/31taxpayer.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2226517/"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/234777"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) even believe the effort could eventually turn a profit. And, as Republicans are quick to emphasize, President Romney was able to spare the federal government any continuing role in the management of the banks as nationalization would have entailed.<br /><br />A </span><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aeSenIUvpSK0&pos=10"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Bloomberg</em> story from March 10, 2010</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, provided a typical summary of the president's economic success:<br /><br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The judgment of money in all its forms has been overwhelmingly positive [in its appraisal of the president's economic performance].</span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">One year after U.S stocks hit their post-financial-crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 68 percent, and it’s up more than 41 percent since [the president] took office. Credit spreads have narrowed. Commodity prices have surged. Housing prices have stabilized. </span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">“We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “It's not surprising that we've had a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.” </span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The economy has also strengthened beyond expectations at the time [the president] took office. The gross domestic product grew at a 5.9 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, compared with a median forecast of 2.0 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists a week before [the president]’s Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration. The median forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.0 percent, according to Bloomberg’s February survey of economists, versus 2.1 percent for 2010 in the<br />survey taken 13 months earlier. </span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">“You have to give them -- along with the Federal Reserve - - a lot of credit,” said Joseph Carson, director of economic research at AllianceBernstein LP in New York. “A year ago, there was panic, as well as concern. And a lot of the expectations were not only that we were going to have declines in activity but they would stretch all the way to 2010, if not 2011.” </span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Since then, monthly job losses have abated, from 779,000 during the month [the president] took office to 36,000 last month. Corporate profits have grown; among 491 companies in the S&P 500 that reported fourth-quarter earnings,profits rose 180 percent from a year ago, according to Bloomberg data. Durable goods orders in January were up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Inflation is tame, and long-term interest rates remain low. ...</span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, said the public’s opinion of the economy is likely to improve as the gains companies have made begin to translate into more jobs and higher wages.<br />...</span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Zandi said the economic rebound is largely a result of the policies of the White House and Federal Reserve. He cited the bank bailout, the Fed’s low-interest-rate policy and support for credit markets, and the ... administration’s stimulus plan, bank stress tests and backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. </span></p><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">“When you take it all together, the response was massive and unprecedented and ultimately successful,” Zandi said.</span> </p></blockquote>The federal budget deficit exploded as a result of the Great Recession, but no one blamed President Romney for that. In January of 2009, even before President Romney took office, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office </span><a href="outbind://45-0000000078C9A4211CA5434188F576DF61F151C807005B7E3BF879AB0E4A93E785308A69FAFD000001C14A3F0000B7F5F274D2013942AC438207B2689BA60000053839420000/Defies%20Pessimists%20as%20Rising%20Economy%20Converges%20With%20Stocks"><span style="font-family:arial;">forecast a $1.2 trillion deficit</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for fiscal 2009 (which began almost four months before Romney took office). As it turns out, the 2009 deficit came in at $1.4 trillion, but that was </span><a href="http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1200/why-economy-needs-spending-not-tax-cuts%20/"><span style="font-family:arial;">primarily the result of a plunge in tax revenue</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (which, at 14.8% of GDP was the lowest it had been since 1950 -- before Medicare, Medicaid and much of the federal government as we know it today). Federal spending actually came in slightly lower than the January 2009 CBO estimate. Indeed, President Romney's biggest battles to control the deficit were with his fellow Republicans who pushed hard for further massive tax cuts. For example, </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09krugman.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">36 Senate Republicans</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> voted for </span><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/29076/its-all-part-of-my-stimulus-fantasy"><span style="font-family:arial;">Jim DeMint's plan</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to permanently cut taxes by more than $3 trillion over the next decade. As President Romney pointed out, those tax cuts would have exacerbated the shortfall in revenue that had already been decimated by the recession. They would have done little to stimulate the economy in the short term while massively increasing the long-term structural budget deficit.<br /><br />President Romney showed his resolve to reduce the deficit by imposing a </span><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/25/obama.spending.freeze/index.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">three-year freeze on non-military discretionary spending</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. And he even had the courage to begin tackling some of the wasteful military spending that Congress had been insisting on against the wishes of the Pentagon. For example, he supported the recommendation of his Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut off all further funding for the $65 billion F-22 fighter program after producing 187 aircraft (none of which had ever been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan). Despite the fact that a majority of Senate Republicans voted to continue that funding, </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/business/22defense.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Romney prevailed with the support of a majority of Democrats</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. He was also tough on NASA, </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/science/space/29nasa.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">canceling Bush's feckless Moon project and proposing to privatize launch services</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, relying instead on commercial launch providers for future missions. And he established a deficit reduction commission headed by Vice President Daniels to address the long-term deficit. (Pundits joked that it was a form of penance for Daniels, who as Bush's budget director had been one of the </span><a href="http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/archives/000544.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">principle salesmen for Bush's budget-busting tax cuts</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and had </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/politics/31BUDG.html?scp=1&sq=mitch%20daniels%20and%20iraq%20and%20the%20cost%20bumiller&st=cse&pagewanted=print"><span style="font-family:arial;">famously predicted that the Iraq war would cost between $50 billion and $60 billion</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. "Putting Mitch Daniels in charge of deficit reduction is like making Rush Limbaugh drug czar," quipped Senator Al Franken.)<br /><br />Although the Great Recession had driven up spending on the "automatic stabilizers" like unemployment compensation and Medicaid, President Romney's </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/"><span style="font-family:arial;">budget</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> had spending coming back down to </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/hist01z2.xls"><span style="font-family:arial;">23.2%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of GDP by fiscal 2012 (despite unemployment forecast to persist over 8%) and </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/hist01z2.xls"><span style="font-family:arial;">22.8%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> by 2013 (with unemployment still over 7%). As the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> noted in an editorial defending the Romney budget, "By 2012, spending as a percentage of the economy will be back down to the levels we enjoyed under President Reagan thirty years ago. Six of the eight Reagan years saw spending over 22% of GDP and for two years it exceeded 23%. President Romney is to be commended for his spending restraint despite inheriting the worst economy in 70 years. If he can deliver on those budgets, it will constitute a remarkable achievement. If it was good enough for Reagan, it's good enough for Romney."<br /><br />It's hard to say which was better, President Romney's economic leadership or his performance as commander-in-chief. Just as he did with his economic team, President Romney sought continuity in his national security team. At his urging, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stayed on. And reflecting the fact that the country was fighting two wars, he named as his national security advisor a four-star Marine general, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Jones"><span style="font-family:arial;">James Jones</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. (Bill O'Reilly followed his praise for that appointment by observing, "Can you imagine who a President Obama might have named? Michael Moore, probably. And maybe Jane Fonda as Secretary of Defense. But only because Barbra Streisand had already taken the CIA post.") President Romney also kept on General David Petraeus as the head of the US Central Command, overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and General Ray Odierno as the top commander of US forces in Iraq.<br /><br />Bush like to call himself a "war president" but he was better at starting wars than successfully concluding them. President Romney was left with the task of finishing what Bush started. So far, he has kept to Bush's withdrawal timetable in Iraq, </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">withdrawing all US troops from Iraqi cities</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> as scheduled by the end of June 2009. After the Iraqi elections of March 2010 went off with minimal violence, he appears to be on track to keep his goal of having </span><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6261YI20100307"><span style="font-family:arial;">all US combat troops out of Iraq by the end of August 2010 and all remaining troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />But President Romney's bigger challenge was in Afghanistan, which had been all but ignored by the Bush/Cheney team.<br /><br />By the time President Romney took office, the US war effort in that country was going badly and getting worse. The Taliban had been allowed to reconstitute themselves. They controlled large parts of Afghanistan and increasingly threatened neighboring Pakistan, even controlling the Swat Valley only 100 miles from the capital of Islamabad. President Romney doubled US troops in Afghanistan during his first year in office, from less than 35,000 to over 70,000, and </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34218604/ns/politics-white_house"><span style="font-family:arial;">announced</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that he would increase those forces by another 30,000 in 2010 -- tripling the force Bush/Cheney left behind. He was also able finally to enlist the aid of Pakistan in that effort, which paid off in February 2010 with the </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16intel.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">capture of the Taliban's top military commander</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (second only to Mullah Omar in the Taliban hierarchy). By 2010, it was estimated that there were fewer than 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and there were </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-extremist-wedge12-2010mar12,0,2270910.story"><span style="font-family:arial;">increasing signs of a rift</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> between them and their former hosts, the Taliban. Certainly it was too early to declare that President Romney had turned around the Bush/Cheney administration's failing effort in Afghanistan. But at least he was making a go of it.<br /><br />Needless to say, Republicans were effusive in their praise of President Romney's performance. They were exultant that he had largely erased memories of the Bush/Cheney years and had given new luster to the Republican brand. His pragmatic, centrist policies made it difficult for Democratic opposition to gain traction. The result was an increase in bipartisan cooperation in Washington. Nowhere was that more true than with perhaps the greatest triumph of President Romney's first year -- the popular health care reform bill </span><a href="http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.27/859.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">modeled on his successful effort in Massachusetts</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. No only did it pass Congress with large bipartisan majorities but it gave Republicans ownership of a key issue that had long been a Democratic strength.<br /><br />As President Romney </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2247467/"><span style="font-family:arial;">said</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "What we did, I think, is the ultimate conservative plan. We said people have to take responsibility for getting insurance, if they can afford it, or paying their own way. No more free riders" RomneyCare, as some people called it, was based on three key elements: 1/ Insurance reforms that required insurance companies to cover everyone with certain minimum standards for coverage and without being able to reject people with pre-existing conditions, 2/ to prevent people from "gaming the system" and waiting until they get sick to buy insurance, the plan included an individual mandate to purchase insurance (the core of Romney's "Personal Responsibility Plan"), and 3/ refundable tax credits, based on ability to pay, to help those who couldn't otherwise afford insurance. To increase competition, the plan created government-run insurance exchanges where consumers can choose among private insurance plans.<br /><br />Unlike Democratic single-payer plans (or "Medicare for all") that Republicans said would have entailed a "government takeover of health care," President Romney's plan worked entirely through private insurance providers, for care delivered through private doctors, private hospitals and other private providers. For the 80% or so of American who get their health insurance through their employers there would be essentially no change in how they receive their health care. But his plan extended coverage to 30 million or so Americans who previous lacked it and instituted reforms to market for individual coverage that ensured Americans wouldn't lose their health care if they lost or changed their jobs. And all that was based on conservative principles of personal responsibility and free markets that had previously been proven effective and popular in Massachusetts. The plan was virtually identical in its </span><a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">key elements</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to the </span><a href="http://2parse.com/?p=4196"><span style="font-family:arial;">Republican alternative to Clinton's health care reform proposed in 1993</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />The one major partisan battle in the health care overhaul effort was the push by Congressional Democrats for a "public option" -- a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private plans. Democrats argued that it would provide additional competition, with consumers having a free choice among public and private plans (the way public and private colleges compete today), and with all health care still delivered though private providers (as with Medicare and Medicaid today). But President Romney threatened to veto any bill with a public option and Democrats eventually backed down. That standoff ultimately cost President Romney some Democratic votes, but with virtually all Republicans supporting the bill it had no trouble passing both houses of Congress with large bipartisan majorities.<br /><br />Among the benefits of President Romney's health care plan was the elimination of "</span><a href="http://www.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2009/08/05/will-health-reform-free-workers-from-job-lock.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">job lock</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">" where employees of large companies with health care insurance are unwilling or unable to leave their current jobs because they would lose their health insurance and wouldn't be able to obtain it on their own because of pre-existing conditions or for other reasons. Elimination of job lock is expected to benefit entrepreneurs and small businesses (most of which don't provide health care coverage) and make the economy more efficient and dynamic.<br /><br />Not surprisingly, President Romney's health care plan was enormously popular and provided a big boost to his presidency. Republicans crowed about finally delivering on near-universal health care coverage without reliance on big government solutions.<br /><br />Rush Limbaugh was among the conservatives who expressed their relief at finally having a Republican president whose performance they could defend. Speaking of his past support for Republicans, </span><a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3063/rush-limbaugh-i-feel-liberated"><span style="font-family:arial;">Limbaugh said</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "I feel liberated... I no longer have to carry water for people who don't deserve it."<br /><br />It makes you wonder how a liberal Democrat like Barack Obama would have responded to the combination of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, trillion dollar deficits and two wars going badly. It's a question most Americans are glad they don't have to answer in light of the stellar executive performance of President Romney during his first year. Americans seem to be united in the conclusion that the experienced conservative was the right choice for America at a time of crisis.<br /><br /><em><strong>Note:</strong> Tom Tomorrow has noted how difficult political satire is in our current political climate. Even the most ridiculous fictions often fail to match the absurdities of the daily headlines. I have found in my own experience that political satire tends to fall flat. So at the risk of stating the obvious, let me explain that the foregoing was an attempt to imagine how Republicans would react to the policies and performance of President Obama had they been those of one of their own. It is not necessarily my own reaction to those policies or even the elements of President Obama's performance that I might emphasize. All the facts and figures are real (with links, for the most part). Although there is obviously a satirical element to this summary, I think the partisan perspective it portrays is reasonable accurate.</em> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-91127082600929223162010-03-09T19:25:00.001-08:002010-03-09T19:44:49.824-08:00reconciling ridiculous rhetoric<span style="font-family:arial;">I have to give Republicans credit. They, and their right-wing noise machine, sure do a great job of OUTRAGE!!!! They can get OUTRAGED over all kinds of things, from the absurdly trivial and unobjectionable (e.g., </span><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/04/obama.schools/index.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama giving a speech to school children telling them to work hard and stay in school</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) to things that were common practice when they were running the show (e.g., trying terrorism suspects in the American courts: </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/opinion/10wed1.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">under President Bush more than 300 individuals were convicted on terrorism-related charges in regular civil courts</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> vs. </span><a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/16/joe-biden/two-three-convicted-military-commissions-released/"><span style="font-family:arial;">only three terrorism suspects convicted in military commissions, two of whom were subsequently released</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">).<br /><br />The latest OUTRAGE is the prospect of an “up-or-down” vote in the Senate on a package of amendments to the health care reform bill that passed that body with 60 votes last December. In the current Republican parlance this is referred to as either “ramming”, “cramming” or “jamming” health care reform “down the throats” of the American people. As Richard Cohen </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/08/AR2010030802216.html?hpid=opinionsbox1"><span style="font-family:arial;">writes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the <em>Washington Post</em> today:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Googling to my heart's content on a recent eve, I decided to match "health care" with "ram" to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits, some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year, several votes, countless presidential speeches and having to look upon the face of Harry Reid some 10,000 times, the health-care bill is being "rammed" through Congress -- an absurdity that now has currency through sheer repetition. It is not exactly the renowned vaunted Big Lie, just a miserable little one.<br /></span></blockquote>Check out </span><a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/home?xrs=SI_65188063_4491965560_1"><span style="font-family:arial;">this segment from last night’s Colbert Report</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (especially the series of clips at around the 2:00 mark). As Colbert notes, “The American people don’t want anything jammed down their throats … unless it is first battered and deep-fat fried.”<br /><br />The point of this exercise in OUTRAGE, of course, is to convince the American people that there is something illegitimate about passing a measure in the Senate on the basis of a mere… majority of Senators. The notion that a supermajority is required to pass anything in the Senate is even being portrayed as the will of the Founding Fathers. </span><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/if-the-founders-had-wanted-a-supermajority-requirement-for-the-senate-they-could-have-put-one-in-the-constitution.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> is Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH): </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[U]nder the Senate rules, anything that comes across the floor of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. It’s called the filibuster. That’s the way the Senate was structured. … The Founding Fathers realized when they structured this they wanted checks and balances. They didn’t want things rushed through. They saw the parliamentary system. They knew it didn’t work. … That’s why we have the 60-vote situation over here in the Senate to require that things get full consideration.<br /></span></blockquote>(And to think President Obama, in a fit of delusional bipartisanship, actually nominated this clown to become Secretary of Commerce.)<br /><br />There are several things wrong with this passage. Matthew Yglesias </span><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/if-the-founders-had-wanted-a-supermajority-requirement-for-the-senate-they-could-have-put-one-in-the-constitution.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">notes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> one: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“[J]ust to point out that Gregg is an idiot, where on earth has he gotten the idea that the Founding Fathers “saw the parliamentary system” and “knew it didn’t work?” <strong>There were no countries operating on a modern parliamentary system when the constitution was written. </strong>And why doesn’t it work? It seems to work in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, etc.” </span></blockquote>The more important point is that the filibuster is not in the Constitution. As a constitutional expert who wrote a book on the filibuster notes, </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/how_the_filibuster_was_invente.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">the filibuster is actually something of a historical accident</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that came into being after the Constitution was ratified and only discovered as a tool of obstructionism long after that. The Founders considered the idea of supermajority requirement and rejected it except for a few purposes specified in the Constitution like overriding presidential vetoes, ratifying treaties and impeachment. As I’ve noted a </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/02/out-of-control.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">couple of times</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/12/unhealthy-politics.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">previously</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, it was rarely used prior to the 1970’s. But in the year since President Obama took office there have been more GOP filibusters than there were in the twenty years </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/234489"><span style="font-family:arial;">between 1963 and 1983</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Republican use of the filibuster in the current Congress is on pace to </span><a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRk0FZDifKVczo6ssCt82rw2lTYQD9E60UQ80"><span style="font-family:arial;">triple the previous record</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. This isn’t a matter of seeking greater deliberation. It is an attempt by Senate Republicans to thwart any successful action by Senate Democrats – who despite losing the Massachusetts Senate seat still have the largest Senate majority in over 30 years (the last time either party had Senate majority larger than 59 was in 1979). </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32047.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Republicans are even filibustering measures that they co-sponsored</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /></p></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTvzjnL7QN7y3xuqdeGCLrT0FaY36oHB3xSWYsT44-sKiHmsskcr6Pc9fS32h3IMO0BmXtDsJYQ30HulbBmablcIRPjAi3iS_p3gXsEHzys07yMb6HGaAS4iriYAumy594JR8m9TgSJ0/s1600-h/toles+101.bmp"><span style="font-family:arial;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446841287255308498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 358px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTvzjnL7QN7y3xuqdeGCLrT0FaY36oHB3xSWYsT44-sKiHmsskcr6Pc9fS32h3IMO0BmXtDsJYQ30HulbBmablcIRPjAi3iS_p3gXsEHzys07yMb6HGaAS4iriYAumy594JR8m9TgSJ0/s400/toles+101.bmp" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><br />As is typically the case, once the right-wing noise machine kicks into gear with its bogus narrative, the “mainstream” media dutifully report on the “controversy” using the Republican framing.<br /><br />As Andrew Romano writes in an </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/234489"><span style="font-family:arial;">excellent piece</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> at <em>Newsweek</em>:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced at a White House gathering of health-care professionals that he wants Congress to schedule "an up-or-down vote" on health-care reform "in the next few weeks." A few minutes later <em>The Washington Post</em> sent out a political news alert translating his remarks for laypeople. In "a move intended to bypass a Republican caucus that remains united in its opposition to the legislation," the paper wrote, "Obama [just] endorsed the controversial legislative tactic known as reconciliation." </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">“The controversial legislative tactic known as reconciliation": Republicans must have been delighted to read in the Post that they'd won the framing war and redefined reconciliation as some sort of abomination. The fact is, reconciliation has been around since 1974, when it was created to help lawmakers avoid filibusters on politically difficult budget legislation by allowing a simple majority vote. For the past 35 years, no one has made much of a stink about it. But last month, in a preemptive effort to sour the public on the procedure, Republicans decided to start describing it as something dirty and dishonorable. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah suddenly began tossing around the phrase "highly partisan nuclear option"; Sen. Lamar Alexander warned that it would lead to "the end of the Senate" as we know it. Pretty soon, what had long been considered standard Senate operating procedure began to sound downright apocalyptic. </p></span></blockquote>An </span><a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/muscle-bound"><span style="font-family:arial;">editorial</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in <em>The New Republic</em> gives more examples of the mainstream acceptance of the Republican framing: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">As the filibuster has evolved from a rarely used signal of unusually strong dissent into a routine requirement for a supermajority, reconciliation has become a vital legislative tool, embraced by both parties. And it has come into play now because Democrats need it to make health care reform palatable to both chambers of Congress. Their plan is to have the House pass the Senate bill, and then to have both the House and Senate amend the bill through reconciliation. The amendments, Democrats agree, would be limited to questions of tax and spending levels--the very sorts of issues for which reconciliation was designed.<br /><br />In response, Republicans have exploded in indignation, and their complaints have found a sympathetic hearing in the Washington media. Here are a few select samples of the coverage--all from straight-news reporters: “Democrats have not ruled out the possibility of using a strong-arm tactic, called ‘budget reconciliation,’" (Associated Press); “Obama may be ready to play hardball and lean on filibuster-busting reconciliation rules” (<em>Roll Call</em>); “the hardball strategy would worsen partisan friction” (<em>Congressional Quarterly</em>). <em>The New York Times</em>, as if seized by a tic, has used the term “muscle” on at least three occasions to describe reconciliation.<br /><br />This hackishness was most recently on display in a thunderous <em>Washington Post</em> op-ed by Senator Orrin Hatch. Lamenting the haste of simple majority votes, the great elder statesman railed that “the Constitution intends the opposite process,” a claim that is utterly ahistorical--the Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster. Indeed, the Constitution prescribes a supermajority vote for a mere handful of select purposes, ordinary legislation not among them.<br /></span></blockquote>So let’s clear up some of the confusion over this radical tool of majority rule known as “reconciliation.”<br /><br />As the <em>Newsweek </em>piece quoted above notes, reconciliation has been around for over 35 years, and it has never been particularly controversial despite having been used for everything from the Bush tax cuts, to the 1996 welfare reform, and most of the health care measures enacted during that time. Republicans even used it in 2005 to try to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling (fortunately the measure was </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/09/AR2005110902029.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">killed in the House</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). Depending on how you count, reconciliation has been used 19 times, 16 of those by Republicans.<br /><br />Republicans have been saying things like, reconciliation "has never been used for this kind of major systemic reform" (Mitch McConnell) and "there's never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way" (Lamar Alexander). In fact, health care reform has already passed both houses of Congress. It passed the Senate with 60 votes in December. If the House adopts the Senate bill and President Obama signs it, it becomes law. And that is the plan.<br /><br />Although the House has already passed its own version of the health care bill, both houses have to pass identical versions. Since Democrats no longer have the 60 votes required to overcome a Republican filibuster, the Senate bill has to be the basic bill that both houses enact. But there are changes to that bill that the House and President Obama – and even the Senate itself – would like to make. It is only those changes that would be passed through reconciliation. Most of those changes are relatively minor and unobjectionable – like getting rid of the “Cornhusker Kickback”, a provision favoring Nebraska inserted in the Senate bill to secure the support of Ben Nelson (even Nelson no longer supports it). It would also include changes offered up by President Obama to Congressional Republicans like funding for state initiatives to reduce medical malpractice costs.<br /><br />It’s also worth noting that most health care reforms enacted in recent decades have been passed using reconciliation. For example, COBRA, the law that allows you to keep your health insurance if you lose your job, was a reconciliation measure signed into law by President Reagan in 1985. (“COBRA” stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budge RECONCILATION Act.) Similarly, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was passed using reconciliation.<br /><br />The one major health care measure that was NOT passed using reconciliation was the massive Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit passed by Republicans in 2003 which </span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/part-d-revisited/"><span style="font-family:arial;">created an unfunded liability of nearly $10 trillion dollars</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Nonetheless, it passed the Senate with only 54 votes. In its initial House vote it passed by only one vote, 216-215. When it came up for a final vote at 3am, the measure was losing at the close of the standard voting period. At that point Republican leaders froze the clock and kept the vote open for over three hours as they bribed and threatened members until they reached the necessary majority. Never before or since have tactics like those been used to pass a measure in Congress. (You can read accounts of that whole sordid affair </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Improvement,_and_Modernization_Act#Legislative_history"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/lessons_from_the_medicare_pres.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />The most ambitious use of reconciliation was for the two major Bush tax cuts which have since added a couple of trillion dollars to the national debt. The original idea behind reconciliation was that it would be used to help reduce the deficit. The health care reform bill is consistent with that intent – the Congressional Budget Office </span><a href="http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=446"><span style="font-family:arial;">estimates</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that it would reduce the deficit by over $100 billion in its first decade and upwards of $1 trillion over the next decade.<br /><br />So </span><a href="http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/03/what_are_these_1.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">compare</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> the budgetary impact of the two major Bush tax cuts with the Senate health care reform bill as initially scored by the CBO:<br /><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKORJOaKsgx6tnP3QJgByu74Jz1X_GfsveV_f3uSEbYV-dYE21tVTT9KLQOz8mnGVZChdkDD88Mt2qNiZIQLdtZmoiSzS7qTWd61qcdCclWk4dwh6BLbrtAPPBlg38COJZub0-qTkYRkQ/s1600-h/3+numbers+reconciliation.bmp"><span style="font-family:arial;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446841777793282898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 384px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 384px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKORJOaKsgx6tnP3QJgByu74Jz1X_GfsveV_f3uSEbYV-dYE21tVTT9KLQOz8mnGVZChdkDD88Mt2qNiZIQLdtZmoiSzS7qTWd61qcdCclWk4dwh6BLbrtAPPBlg38COJZub0-qTkYRkQ/s400/3+numbers+reconciliation.bmp" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:78%;">[The first bar is the impact on the unified budget balance of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief <strong>Reconciliation</strong> Act (EGTRRA) of 2001. The second is the impact on the budget balance of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief <strong>Reconciliation</strong> Act (JGTRRA) of 2003. The third bar is the CBO estimated impact on the deficit of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act proposed in the Senate on November 19, for 2010-2019.]<br /></span><br />Which of these is consistent with the original intention of the reconciliation procedure? (The 2003 tax cut resulted in a 50-50 tie in the Senate – it was only “rammed through” with the vote of the </span><a href="http://www.tarfumes.com/political/dick-cheney-angry.jpg"><span style="font-family:arial;">Dark One</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />The 2001 Bush tax cut entailed another twist. The arbiter of whether a measure can be passed using reconciliation is the Senate parliamentarian. In 2001, when the parliamentarian (who had been put in the job by Republicans when they gained control of the Senate in 1994) issued a series of rulings that complicated used of reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts, Republican Senate leaders </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/us/rules-keeper-is-dismissed-by-senate-official-says.html?pagewanted=1"><span style="font-family:arial;">summarily fired him</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. (Talk about “ramming through” a measure.) The guy they put in his place remains the parliamentarian to this day. Nonetheless, Republicans are already </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/03/republicans-worry-about-o_n_483819.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">laying the ground</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for attacks on him as being biased in favor of Senate Democrats. Expect to be hearing a lot about the Senate parliamentarian in next few weeks.<br /><br />All of this is beside the point, really. The Republican objective in expressing OUTRAGE over reconciliation is to sow more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) over health care reform. A </span><a href="http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1478/political-iq-quiz-knowledge-filibuster-debt-colbert-steele"><span style="font-family:arial;">recent Pew poll</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> found that 74% of Americans don’t understand what a filibuster is. They certainly aren’t going to immerse themselves in the details of the Senate’s procedural history. All they will know is that the angry guys they listen to on FOX News and talk radio are really OUTRAGED over how Democrats are going about passing health care reform. It will just join the list of apocryphal OUTRAGES like death panels, free health care for illegal aliens and government-subsidized abortions Republicans have been using to scare and anger the American people.<br /><br />And the Washington media will continue to “report the controversy.” </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-53919269654455392552010-03-01T18:16:00.000-08:002010-03-01T19:05:21.222-08:00the filibuster follies continue<span style="font-family:arial;">Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) actually voted against the jobs bill before he voted for it.<br /><br />Here is a screenshot of his </span><a href="http://alexander.senate.gov/public/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Senate Web site</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (courtesy of </span><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/lamar-alexander-wants-to-have-it-both-ways-on-jobs-bill.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Matthew Yglesias</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">):<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNV9vpW4Ki9OFAhqnCPWT6Zxbo2cow4YIe4xEzpNRsbuNeyc_ngLqQrXalBOL9z3_5ToXOkCzH7ko2sDPJOggJFbOVR02osJPcxu_XFIQ_qyLMYtX81oJ1D0d5o6-x6PCSbDCKOv97kRM/s1600-h/Alexander.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443855052180497426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 399px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 142px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNV9vpW4Ki9OFAhqnCPWT6Zxbo2cow4YIe4xEzpNRsbuNeyc_ngLqQrXalBOL9z3_5ToXOkCzH7ko2sDPJOggJFbOVR02osJPcxu_XFIQ_qyLMYtX81oJ1D0d5o6-x6PCSbDCKOv97kRM/s400/Alexander.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The HIRE Act, which he supported, and “Reid’s partisan jobs bill,” which he voted to filibuster, are exactly the same piece of legislation. Alexander voted FOR the Republican filibuster of the jobs bill last week. But when that filibuster was overcome with 62 votes, he was among many Republicans who turned around and voted FOR the same jobs bill they had just voted to filibuster. No intervening changes in the bill. And he actually boasts about both votes on his Web site (although you would never know they both involved the same bill).<br /><br />Sen. John Kerry was pilloried during his 2004 presidential campaign for saying of an Iraq war funding bill, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” But in that case, Kerry was actually talking about two different versions of the bill. The first one – the one he voted FOR – would have temporarily reversed Bush’s tax cuts for those making over $400,000 a year in order to pay for the Iraq war funding. The second bill – the one he voted AGAINST – had no funding mechanism and just added the $87 billion of Iraq war spending to the national debt. His awkward quote was used as an example of his supposed lack of principle whereas, in fact, it was an example of his holding firm to the principle that we have to pay for our spending rather than adding it to the national debt.<br /><br />By contrast, Alexander (and other Republicans) voted to filibuster and subsequently to pass identical bills.<br /><br />As I’ve noted a couple of times before (</span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/02/out-of-control.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/02/boehner-vs-boehner.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), this is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon among Senate Republicans. Stall and obstruct by every means possible. But if that fails, vote for the popular legislation you just tried to kill.<br /><br />Another one of those Republican Senators who “voted against the jobs bill before he voted for it” was Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma. But Inhofe threw in a nice twist. Among other things, the jobs bill will renew funding for highway projects through the end of the year. After voting to filibuster the jobs bill, </span><a href="http://newsok.com/sen.-jim-inhofe-now-backs-jobs-bill-more-state-highway-money/article/3441964?custom_click=lead_story_title#ixzz0gx7OUcio"><span style="font-family:arial;">Inhofe complained that the funding provided by the bill was delayed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate panel that oversees highway funding, said Congress has waited too long to provide a long-term extension of highway programs. The extension approved Wednesday lasts through the year. Because Congress has not approved a new highway bill, Inhofe said, states have been relying on short-term extensions that have been $1 billion a month less than in the previous fiscal year. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Oklahoma and states across the nation have been forced to pay a steep price, in many cases with significant job losses and canceled highway projects, because of the failure of Democrats and Republicans in Washington to come together sooner to get the job done,” Inhofe said. "With the extension now passed, states will have the needed certainty to move forward on transportation projects, leading to more jobs in many cases.” </span><p></p></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;">This goes in the “<em>chutzpah</em>” file (along with the kid who kills both his parents and then begs for the mercy of the court because he is an orphan). So what was preventing “Democrats and Republicans in Washington to come together sooner and get the job done”? The filibuster that Inhofe supported.<br /><br />(Grist has an </span><a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-25-james-inhofe-senate-top-skeptic-explains-climate-hoax-theory/"><span style="font-family:arial;">interesting – and whacky – interview</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> with the climate-science-denying Senator from Oklahoma.)<br /><br />Some of this stuff would be funny if it didn’t have real consequences for real people. For example, just today, </span><a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/01/89610/gops-bunning-told-off-senators.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">over one million Americans are expected to lose their unemployment insurance and COBRA coverage</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> because one Republican Senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky (without objection from Republican leaders), is obstructing extension of those benefits. His obstruction also resulted in the </span><a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/01/1507212/who-really-gets-hurt-from-hold.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Department of Transportation furloughing 2000 employees</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> today and various transportation projects around the country being shut down temporarily. It also had the effect of immediately triggering a </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/bunning-blockade-leads-to-21-percent-pay-cut-to-doctors.php?ref=fpblg"><span style="font-family:arial;">21% fee reduction to doctors seeing Medicare patients</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />Bunning later </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/bunning-my-obstruction-of-unemployment-extension-made-me-miss-my-basketball-game.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">complained</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that his one-man filibuster had caused him to miss the Kentucky – South Carolina basketball game. In response to Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley’s pleading with him to let the necessary legislation pass, Bunning said, “</span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33566.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">tough shit</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.” When an ABC producer tried to interview him he </span><a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/03/sen-bunning-is-angry-this-is-a-senators-only-elevator.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">extended his middle finger</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in an impolite gesture. (But, we’re told, if Democrats use the procedural tools at their disposal to get around Republican obstructionism, it might disrupt the Senate’s “comity.” Or was that “comedy”?)<br /><br />Bunning’s one-man obstruction shouldn’t be confused with Senator Shelby’s one-man “blanket hold” on all of President Obama’s appointees awaiting confirmation in the Senate. That was </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/02/out-of-control.html"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em><strong>last month’s</strong></em> out-of-control-Republican-Senator-shutting-down-the business-of-the-Senate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> outrage.<br /><br />The AP has an article out today noting that </span><a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRk0FZDifKVczo6ssCt82rw2lTYQD9E60UQ80"><span style="font-family:arial;">Republican use of the filibuster is on track to triple the previous record</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The frequency of filibusters — plus threats to use them — are measured by the number of times the upper chamber votes on cloture. Such votes test the majority's ability to hold together 60 members to break a filibuster. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Last year, the first of the 111th Congress, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the first two months of 2010, the number already exceeds 40. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">That means, with 10 months left to run in the 111th Congress, Republicans have turned to the filibuster or threatened its use at a pace that will more than triple the old record. <p></p></span></blockquote><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">No wonder there are over <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/02/23/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6235854.shtml">290 bills that have been passed by the House</a> over the past year and that are currently languishing in the Senate (including major legislation like cap-and-trade and financial reform). The House has been extraordinarily productive over the past year. And had majority rule prevailed in the Senate, so would have the Senate. The Constitution specifies a limited category of matters (like treaties and impeachment) that require a super-majority in the Senate. For everything else, you either have majority rule or you have a system of gridlock where no one has ultimate accountability to the American people.<br /><br />The Senate is broken. And if we don’t fix it, it will break the country.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-68212960603223919492010-02-24T21:56:00.000-08:002010-02-24T22:07:07.002-08:00boehner vs. boehner<span style="font-family:arial;">You might recall my </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/02/out-of-control.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">previous account</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of Republicans leaders <strong><em>demanding</em></strong> that President Obama agree to the creation of a deficit reduction commission ... until President Obama agreed to it. </span><a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=111-s20090512-8"><span style="font-family:arial;">Here is Senate Minority Leader McConnell</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">As I have said many times before, the best way to address the [deficit] crisis is the Conrad-Gregg proposal. . . . It deserves support from both sides of the aisle. … So I urge the administration, once again, to support the Conrad-Gregg proposal. This proposal is our best hope for addressing the out-of-control spending and debt levels that are threatening our Nation's fiscal future.<br /></span></blockquote><br /></span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address"><span style="font-family:arial;">So President Obama agreed to it.</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> At which point Senate Republicans <em><strong>filibustered it</strong></em>. The Senate failed to overcome the filibuster by a </span><a href="http://www.opencongress.org/vote/2010/s/5"><span style="font-family:arial;">53 to 46 vote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. It would have passed if seven Republican <strong>co-sponsors</strong> and McConnell had voted to break the filibuster. They didn't just vote against it. They voted to <em><strong>filibuster it</strong></em> -- a parliamentary maneuver that used to be reserved for extraordinary matters like denying civil rights to black people but now used to obstruct anything and everything that comes before the Senate. If they had only allowed it to come to a fair "up or down vote" they could have still voted against it and it would have passed. <strong>But they voted to filibuster the very same bill they co-sponsored and demanded that President Obama support.<br /></strong><br />Do you really have any doubt these guys are nihilists?<br /><br />Then there is the increasingly common Republican practice of filibustering a bill ... until if it manages to survive their procedural attacks, then they turn around and vote for it ... because they really don't have a principled reason to oppose it. Like when Senate Republicans spent </span><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2010/02/03/obama_takes_jobs_pitch_to_nh/"><span style="font-family:arial;">several weeks obstructing a vote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on a bill extending unemployment benefits, requiring that it survive three cloture votes to overcome their filibusters. But once it became clear they were eventually going to lose, Republicans all voted for the bill and it passed 98-0. Weeks of obstruction of a bill they voted for. Now common practice among Senate Republicans. Because they know most Americans generally don't follow all this procedural maneuvering and will blame Democrats for the failure to enact legislation to help the American people at a time of national distress. But they don't want to be held accountable for actually voting against it.<br /><br />Which brings us to tomorrow's televised health care summit.<br /><br />You might recall Congressional Republicans demanding that President Obama agree to televise negotiations over health care reform legislation. </span><a href="http://policy.house.gov/boehner-endorses-c-span%E2%80%99s-request-public-health-care-negotiations-0"><span style="font-family:arial;">Here is House Minority leader Boehner</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;"><em><strong>[E]very issue of national import should be debated by the people's elected representatives in full public view</strong></em>, but this is especially true with something as personal and important as health care. Clocking in at a combined 4,765 pages, the House and Senate health care bills propose drastic and expensive changes in the way Americans live. [RD note: Nice touch -- combining the page totals of both the House and Senate bills.] Dozens of differences between the two bills have been identified, including fundamental changes to the patient-doctor relationship.<br /><br /><em><strong>Hard-working families won't stand for having the future of their health care decided behind closed doors</strong></em>. These secret deliberations are a breeding ground for more of the kickbacks, shady deals and special-interest provisions that have become business as usual in Washington. Too much is at stake to have a final bill built on payoffs and pork-barrel spending.<br /></span></blockquote><br />So ... you know where this is going. President Obama agrees to debate these issues in a televised forum in full view of the American people. Boehner is totally psyched, right?<br /><br />Just kidding, of course. <br /><br />Boehner equivocates over whether Republicans will even attend the health care summit. </span><a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/boehner-how-dare-obama-televise-the-health-care-debate-after-i-demanded-he-televise-the-health-care.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Fox News' Greta Van Susteren</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> asks Boehner what he thinks about the fact that it's going to be televised and she adds, "the American people are probably delighted that we're getting this televised:"<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Boehner responded: "I think that's fine, but you know, is this a political event or is this going to be a real conversation?"</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Van Susteren didn't let that slide: "Well, except that we've been hammering them about the transparency. The president said, you know, he was going to put everything on C-SPAN, so we can't criticize him now for when he finally does put it on C-SPAN."</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Boehner said "well, that's fine," but he doesn't "want to walk into some set-up."</p></span></blockquote>How dare President Obama televise the discussions we demanded that he televise.<br /><br />Oh, and remember that bit above about the House and Senate bills combined "[c]locking in at a combined 4,765 pages"? Another big Republican theme: The health care bills are too long. Here is </span><a href="http://gopleader.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=152439"><span style="font-family:arial;">Boehner again</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“The best way to get a sense of what Speaker Pelosi’s takeover of health care looks like is to actually look at it. Just shy of 2,000 pages, it runs more than 620 pages longer than the government-run plan Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993. This 1,990 pages of bureaucracy will centralize health care decision making in Washington, DC. "<br /></span></blockquote><br />So President Obama agrees to post on-line at least 72 hours prior to the televised bipartisan health care discussion his summary of the Democratic proposal. Republicans refuse to come up with any proposals of their own. And how does Boehner react to President Obama's public proposal? It's not long enough. Seriously. Here is </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/boehner-obamas-health-care-proposal-is-too-short.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Boehner's spokesman</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The White House's 'plan' consists of an 11-page outline, which has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office or posted online as legislative text. So they want to reorganize one-sixth of the United States' economy with a document shorter than a comic book ...<br /></span></blockquote><br />Goldilocks is easier to please than these guys.<br /><br />Nihilists.<br /><br />They think they win if our government -- and the country -- fails. And they think we are stupid enough to blame it on President Obama. <br /><br />I just hope they're not right about that.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-28768249562227810032010-02-23T21:28:00.000-08:002010-02-23T21:30:23.051-08:00progressivism<span style="font-family:arial;">What can I add?<br /><br />From </span><a title="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-22-2010/rage-within-the-machine---progressivism" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-22-2010/rage-within-the-machine---progressivism"><span style="font-family:arial;">The Daily Show</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.</span><br /><br /><table style="FONT: 11px arial; COLOR: #333; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f5f5f5" height="353" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="360"><tbody><tr style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e5e5e5" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right">Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; COLOR: #333; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-DECORATION: none" colspan="2" target="_blank" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-22-2010/rage-within-the-machine---progressivism">Rage Within the Machine - Progressivism<a></a></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #353535" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 360px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right" colspan="2"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #96deff; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">http://www.thedailyshow.com/</a></td></tr><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><embed style="DISPLAY: block" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:265200" width="360" height="301" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="autoPlay=false" allowscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" bgcolor="#000000"></embed></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 18px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><table style="MARGIN: 0px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" height="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes" target="_blank">Daily Show<br />Full Episodes</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.indecisionforever.com/" target="_blank">Political Humor</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/health" target="_blank">Health Care Crisis</a></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-38292528751823285992010-02-18T17:23:00.001-08:002010-02-19T07:49:11.996-08:00stimulus success<span style="font-family:arial;">It was a year ago this week that President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the “stimulus bill.” He had been in office for less than a month.<br /><br />In late January of last year, President Obama took office facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (and with two wars going badly and a trillion dollar deficit). He sought bipartisan support for legislation to help turn around the economy. Since interest rates were already at the “zero bound,” representing the limit of traditional monetary policies, primary reliance would have to be on fiscal policy. Despite analyses from his own Council of Economic Advisors that </span><a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/02/american_unemployment"><span style="font-family:arial;">a fiscal stimulus of roughly $1.2 trillion was necessary</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, President Obama cut it back to less than two-thirds of that size in an effort to accommodate Congressional Republicans. Over one-third of the stimulus ($288 billion) took the form of tax cuts for over 95% of all Americans. This was done to appeal to Republicans, despite warnings that those tax cuts would likely be saved rather than spent, diluting their stimulative effect. It constituted the largest two-year tax cut in US history. Despite those efforts at bipartisanship, not a single Republican in the House voted for the bill and only three Republican Senators voted for it (one of whom, Arlen Specter, later became a Democrat after being ostracized by his former party for that treasonous act of bipartisanship). Less than a month into the new administration, in the middle of a national crisis, Congressional Republicans had already settled on a strategy of total opposition and obstruction.<br /><br />So despite the ARRA being too small and too tilted toward tax cuts – in the name of bipartisanship – how has the economy done during President Obama’s first year?<br /><br /></span><a href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/recoveryanniversary/"><span style="font-family:arial;">This chart</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> provides a good summary of course of unemployment over the past two years. In the first three months of 2009, before the ARRA had begun to take effect, the US economy lost an average of over 750,000 jobs a month. A year later, we are pretty close to having stopped the job losses. We still have a very deep hole to climb out of, but you can’t get better until you stop getting worse.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9ISFqXFAgOG8vP1ZeEbnkGiK_Umfe9JwCaah7eQS6u6O7qmgm0dUdhaH9aVJ0uk3G7vNsmyiEIv77pZxJwYUlgTe1jYFDa7UxMmUbX1ZA-xc1-RLgialAw2fpIkfeyqjrfl1uOxtF-ms/s1600-h/road+to+recovery+graph.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439761629734462978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 233px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9ISFqXFAgOG8vP1ZeEbnkGiK_Umfe9JwCaah7eQS6u6O7qmgm0dUdhaH9aVJ0uk3G7vNsmyiEIv77pZxJwYUlgTe1jYFDa7UxMmUbX1ZA-xc1-RLgialAw2fpIkfeyqjrfl1uOxtF-ms/s400/road+to+recovery+graph.bmp" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">[click on image to enlarge]<br /></span><br />GDP numbers tell a similar story. During the fourth quarter of 2008, </span><a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2009/pdf/gdp408f.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">GDP declined at a staggering rate of 6.3%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. In the fourth quarter of 2009, </span><a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">it rose by an estimated 5.7%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />Yesterday, David Leonhardt (the <em>New York Times’</em> best financial writer – you would be well advised to read any article with his byline) had </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">a good article on the effect of the Obama stimulus</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Here is a bit of it:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and </span><a title="More information about Moody's Corporation" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/moodys_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Moody’s</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> </span><a href="http://economy.com/" target="_"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Economy.com</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8<br />million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The </span><a title="More articles about Congressional Budget Office, U.S." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/congressional_budget_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Congressional Budget Office</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.<br />…<br />The reasons for the stimulus’s </span><a title="CNN poll." href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/25/poll.stimulus.money/index.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">middling</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> </span><a title="CNN poll also shows components of bill are popular (PDF)." href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/01/29/rel1j.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">popularity</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> aren’t a mystery. The unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and many families are struggling.<br />Saying that things could have been even worse doesn’t exactly inspire. Liberals<br />don’t like the stimulus because they wish it were bigger. Republicans don’t like<br />it because it’s a Democratic program. … </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Of course, no one can be certain about what would have happened in an alternate universe without a $787 billion stimulus. But there are two main reasons to think the hard-core skeptics are misguided — above and beyond those complicated, independent economic analyses. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The first is the basic narrative that the data offer. Pick just about any area of the economy and you come across the stimulus bill’s footprints. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">In the early months of last year, spending by state and local governments was falling rapidly, as was tax revenue. In the spring, tax revenue continued to drop, yet spending jumped — during the very time when state and local officials were finding out roughly how much stimulus money they would be receiving. This is the money that has kept teachers, police officers, health care workers and firefighters employed.<br />Then there is corporate spending. It surged in the final months of last year. </span><a title="A short biography." href="http://www.economy.com/dismal/bios.asp?author=25"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Mark Zandi</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> of Economy.com (who has advised the McCain campaign and Congressional Democrats) says that the Dec. 31 expiration of a tax credit for corporate investment, which was part of the stimulus, is a big reason. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The story isn’t quite as clear-cut with consumer spending, as skeptics note. Its sharp plunge stopped before </span><a title="More articles about Barack Obama." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><span style="font-family:georgia;">President Obama</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> signed the stimulus into law exactly one year ago. But the billions of dollars in tax cuts, food stamps and jobless benefits in the stimulus have still made a difference. Since February, aggregate wages and salaries have fallen, while consumer spending has risen. The difference between the two — some $100 billion — has essentially come from </span><a title="More articles about economic stimulus." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/economic_stimulus/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><span style="font-family:georgia;">stimulus checks</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The second argument in the bill’s favor is the history of financial crises. They have wreaked terrible damage on economies. Indeed, the damage tended to be even worse than what we have suffered. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Around the world over the last century, the typical </span><a title="More articles about the credit crisis." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><span style="font-family:georgia;">financial crisis</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> caused the jobless rate to rise for almost five years, according to </span><a title="Paper by the economists." href="http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/files/Aftermath.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">work</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. On that timeline, our rate would still be rising in early 2012. Even that may be optimistic, given that the recent crisis was so bad. As </span><a title="More articles about Ben S. Bernanke" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ben_s_bernanke/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Ben Bernanke</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, Henry Paulson (Republicans both) and many others </span><a title="Article on the warnings to Congress." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/washington/19cnd-cong.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">warned</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> in 2008, this </span><a title="More articles about the recession." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/recession_and_depression/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><span style="font-family:georgia;">recession</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> had the potential to become a depression. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Yet the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of <em>this</em> year. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” </span><a title="A short biography." href="http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/AnalystBio/AnalystBioDetail191.htm"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Nariman Behravesh</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.” </p></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">The article quotes HIS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisors and Moody’s Economy.com. The three forecasting firms represented are fully in the mainstream; the individual forecasters are regularly polled in the </span><a href="http://wsj.com/economist"><span style="font-family:arial;">WSJ survey</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, among others. They each provide a counterfactual – comparing the likely course of GDP and employment with and without stimulus. Here is a </span><a href="http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/02/assessing_the_s.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">graph from November</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that is still relevant:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIdiP3lNP-WkrbWVb4AMj65634qOk7smiUbhA9AKC7ZjQyBD5Le-LPzG3MRTTpvZLPpun9Cubmzkrzybun51SO83gEICFop-Yrwx7EBTJwA3YOm6mTqi8vshrMtLn1wDIBUKs3qoccQ-o/s1600-h/three+macro+firms.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439762127224801218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 329px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIdiP3lNP-WkrbWVb4AMj65634qOk7smiUbhA9AKC7ZjQyBD5Le-LPzG3MRTTpvZLPpun9Cubmzkrzybun51SO83gEICFop-Yrwx7EBTJwA3YOm6mTqi8vshrMtLn1wDIBUKs3qoccQ-o/s400/three+macro+firms.bmp" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> [click on image to enlarge]</span><br /><br />Leonhardt also quotes Mark Zandi, a </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/02/AR2009020202971.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">former economic advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Here he is on </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/01/29/zandi-stimulus-gdp-4th/"><span style="font-family:arial;">the effect of the stimulus</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;"><strong>I think stimulus was key to the 4th quarter.</strong> It was really critical to business fixed investment because there was a tax bonus depreciation in the stimulus that expired in December and juiced up fixed investment. And also, it was very critical to housing and residential investment because of the housing tax credit. And the decline in government spending would have been measurably greater without the money from the stimulus. <strong>So the stimulus was very, very important in the 4th quarter.</strong> </span></blockquote><p>Here’s an </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/business/economy/21stimulus.html?_r=2&scp=3%26sq=obama%2520economic%2520stimulus%26st=cse"><span style="font-family:arial;">earlier comment from Zandi</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">… “there was a considerable amount of hand-wringing that [the stimulus] was too small, and I sympathized with that argument,” said Mark Zandi, … Even so, “the<br />stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do — it is contributing to ending the<br />recession,” he added, citing the economy’s third-quarter expansion by a 3.5<br />percent seasonally adjusted annual rate. “In my view, without the stimulus, G.D.P. would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent. And there are a little over 1.1 million more jobs out there as of October than would have been out there without the stimulus.”<br /></span></blockquote>And </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/politics/18obama.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">more</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“The economy has shed some three million jobs over the past year, but it would<br />have lost closer to five million without stimulus. The economy is still struggling, but it would have been much worse without stimulus.”<br /></span></blockquote>Of course, Congressional Republicans continue to defend their obstructionism. House minority whip, Eric Cantor – their go-to guy on the economy – is claiming that the ARRA has been an “</span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/25/cantor-second-job-fair/"><span style="font-family:arial;">utter failure</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” … while at the same time </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/politics/18obama.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">taking credit for the jobs it is creating in his district</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Mr. Obama also borrowed a line from Congressional Democrats, who have been criticizing Republicans like Mr. Cantor for voting against the measure but then rushing back home to scoop up stimulus dollars for projects in their districts.<br /><br />Under the headline “Eric Cantor Is a Hypocrite,” the Democratic National Committee on Wednesday issued a news release about how Mr. Cantor supported a high-speed rail project financed by the stimulus bill, saying it would create 185,000 Virginia jobs.<br /><br />Mr. Obama put it this way: “There are those, let’s face it, across the aisle who have tried to score political points by attacking what we did — even as many of them show up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts.”<br /></span></blockquote>Cantor is not alone. The Center for American Progress has a </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/touting-recovery-opposed/"><span style="font-family:arial;">report showing at least 111 Republicans</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> who voted against the stimulus bill but have since taken credit with their constituents for its successes. </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;">I guess the jobs created by the ARRA are only real if they are in the district of a Congressional Republican.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-66226307576118809162010-02-12T23:05:00.000-08:002010-02-13T00:07:06.700-08:00an irrational climate</p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">“Here's my conclusion: the only strong evidence we have that Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe isn't a clown is that his car isn't small enough."</span></span></span></span></p></blockquote><a href="http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v302/n2/full/scientificamerican0210-88.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">That line</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> came to mind this week as Inhofe, the leading Congressional climate science denier and possibly the craziest person in the Senate (no small distinction), drew attention to his cause by building an igloo with a cardboard sign calling it, “</span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/09/inhofe-family-gore-mockery/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Al Gore’s New Home</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.”<br /><br />Working to keep the crazy contest alive in the Senate and apparently reveling in the opportunity to exhibit his ignorance of climate science, South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint </span><a href="http://twitter.com/JimDeMint/status/8863771523"><span style="font-family:arial;">tweeted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, “It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries 'uncle'.“<br /><br />Not to be out done in the effort to portray this week’s East Coast blizzard as refutation of global warming, </span><a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/fox-news-buries-al-gores-book-in-snow-to-prove-something-or-other-about-climate-change-video.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">FOX News</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (“We Manufacture Stupid”) planted a copy of Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, outside and showed it being buried in snow as their commentator remarked, “Poor Al Gore. We should get a camera outside his house.” Sean Hannity </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/09/hannity-snowstorms-gore/"><span style="font-family:arial;">joined the chorus</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> at FOX: “[T]he most severe winter storm in years … would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.” Yes, so it would seem … if you can’t distinguish “weather” from “climate”.<br /><br />Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said the blizzards that shut down Congress this week have made it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger. To be fair to Sen. Bingaman, he was commenting on the </span><a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/80519-climate-change-legislation-buried-under-record-snowfall-in-capital"><span style="font-family:arial;">political reality in DC</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> rather than the reality of global warming:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“Where’s Al Gore when we need him?” quipped Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who burst out laughing when asked about the prospect of passing cap-and-trade legislation Tuesday while the city was still digging out.</span><br /></blockquote></span><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBfuFh1hxV4lRAF16xwDuJeR44qB9icRdbtLwvNLU1T_tdYqJot5VXpsZpZ5-EV78FuMyDiyDMQNK-fajwDEx6IN0XkVfqDUwddO2yDA_OWFaQVxBQ1cRMCpm730Tw9aaSuqfnSt3B4rI/s1600-h/frozen+congress.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437621495973900290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 336px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBfuFh1hxV4lRAF16xwDuJeR44qB9icRdbtLwvNLU1T_tdYqJot5VXpsZpZ5-EV78FuMyDiyDMQNK-fajwDEx6IN0XkVfqDUwddO2yDA_OWFaQVxBQ1cRMCpm730Tw9aaSuqfnSt3B4rI/s400/frozen+congress.gif" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:78%;">[</span></span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/tomtoles/?name=Toles&date=02092010&type=c"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">Tom Toles</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:78%;">] </span></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:arial;">This is the kind of stupid that makes my head hurt. If it has the same effect on you, take two Tylenol and watch <a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264085/february-10-2010/we-re-off-to-see-the-blizzard">this segment from the Colbert Report</a>.<br /><br /><br /><table style="FONT: 11px arial; COLOR: #333; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f5f5f5" height="353" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="360"><tbody><tr style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e5e5e5" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.colbertnation.com/" target="_blank">The Colbert Report</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right">Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c</td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; COLOR: #333; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-DECORATION: none" colspan="2" target="_blank" href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264085/february-10-2010/we-re-off-to-see-the-blizzard">We're Off to See the Blizzard<a></a></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #353535" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 360px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right" colspan="2"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #96deff; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.colbertnation.com/" target="_blank">http://www.colbertnation.com/</a></td></tr><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><embed style="DISPLAY: block" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:264085" width="360" height="301" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allownetworking="all" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="autoPlay=false" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="window"></embed></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 18px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><table style="MARGIN: 0px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" height="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes" target="_blank">Colbert Report Full Episodes</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.indecisionforever.com/" target="_blank">Political Humor</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.colbertnation.com/special/colbert-vancouver-games" target="_blank">Skate Expectations</a></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>Colbert </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/colbert-rips-fox-news-for_n_458075.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">joined in</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on the climate science denier logic, deeming it "simple observational research: whatever just happened is the only thing that is happening. Just ask any peek-a-boo-ologist.” Using the same rationale as Fox News, Colbert pointed out that, due to it being nighttime, the city was covered in darkness. "Based on this latest data, we can only assume that the sun has been destroyed."<br /><br />The Daily Show picked up the same theme </span><a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-10-2010/unusually-large-snowstorm"><span style="font-family:arial;">in this clip</span></a>:<br /><br /><br /><table style="FONT: 11px arial; COLOR: #333; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f5f5f5" height="353" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="360"><tbody><tr style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e5e5e5" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right">Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; COLOR: #333; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-DECORATION: none" colspan="2" target="_blank" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-10-2010/unusually-large-snowstorm">Unusually Large Snowstorm<a></a></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #353535" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 360px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; TEXT-ALIGN: right" colspan="2"><a style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #96deff; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">http://www.thedailyshow.com/</a></td></tr><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><embed style="DISPLAY: block" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:264247" width="360" height="301" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allownetworking="all" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="autoPlay=false" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="window"></embed></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 18px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><table style="MARGIN: 0px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" height="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes" target="_blank">Daily Show<br />Full Episodes</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.indecisionforever.com/" target="_blank">Political Humor</a></td><td style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/health" target="_blank">Health Care Crisis</a></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></p><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />Among many good bits, it has Aasif Mandvi in the snow at night in New York debating the reality of global warming with Samantha Bee in the Australian summer heat with each citing his or her own experiences at that moment as conclusive evidence. Sadly, it doesn’t take much exaggeration to satirize this stuff. </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;">For fear of stating the obvious, there is no lack of cold temperatures in the Northeast US during winter. The thing that’s required to produce a large snow storm is an uncommon amount of moisture colliding with those cold temperatures. Global warming is resulting in more moisture in the atmosphere which also results in more frequent and more severe storms. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (</span><a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:arial;">IPCC</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), the rise of average global temperatures has led to a 5 percent increase of water vapor within the atmosphere over the past century. Cold Weather + Lots of Moisture = Big Snowstorm. (</span><a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-vine/what-the-snowpocalypse-says-about-global-warming"><span style="font-family:arial;">More here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.) Not that the weather in DC has anything whatsoever to do with global warming as an actual meteorological phenomenon. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Just to be clear, if it happens to by sunny in Seattle on the same day that it is raining in Palm Springs that doesn’t mean Seattle has a drier climate than Palm Springs. </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate"><span style="font-family:arial;">Climate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> encompasses meteorological elements in a given region over long periods of time; weather is the present condition of those same elements over periods of days or weeks. Localized weather conditions tell you almost nothing about broader climate trends. One particular climate science denier of my acquaintance keeps citing the fact that 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade as definitive proof that global warming is a fraud. He just can’t seem to get his head around the concept that there is a great deal of annual and regional variability in temperature patterns. But at least he is looking at the average global temperature for a full year rather than an isolated local weather event as Congressional Republicans and their FOX News overlords have been doing this week.<br /><br />I’m not going to belabor the details of climate science here other than to note that the decade that just ended was the warmest on record. The previous decade had been the warmest on record, beating out the decade prior to that. Here is part of the </span><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">NASA summary</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.</span><br /><br /></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade -- due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean -- 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years -- 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 -- as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.</span><br /><br /></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated.”</span><br /><br /></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s. </span></blockquote><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtdzhjMcOjemP0-SKwPsYsGe4YhMD_f0lia9xQaNAgE0442oGKzYw9NLSJiY7sI2Kp85N8PlSvPEs7AsBjqcAjLAcUEoQ3RbrDP6PRaxYw-gybqoMmdtdLgxhT0skj-Xh030d4sSq9e-c/s1600-h/land-ocean+temp.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437623617219595522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 290px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtdzhjMcOjemP0-SKwPsYsGe4YhMD_f0lia9xQaNAgE0442oGKzYw9NLSJiY7sI2Kp85N8PlSvPEs7AsBjqcAjLAcUEoQ3RbrDP6PRaxYw-gybqoMmdtdLgxhT0skj-Xh030d4sSq9e-c/s400/land-ocean+temp.gif" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:arial;">The point here is not that I am an expert on climate science or that you should agree with my opinions on that subject. The amount of data that I might cite in a blog post shouldn’t convince you that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real and is a big deal. What should persuade you is that the overwhelming consensus of the people who actually study this stuff agree that this is real and is a big deal. Climate science is extraordinarily complex and draws upon many disciplines and a vast amount of data. It’s tough to get 100% agreement on anything in any particular scientific discipline. But the consensus on this is about as close as you are going to get.<br /><br />I’ve cited this anecdote </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-new-deal.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">before</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. At the 2008 </span><a href="http://www.futureinreview.com/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Future in Review Conference</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the </span><a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/"><span style="font-family:arial;">IPCC</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic and is the cause of an increase in global temperatures. He replied, “Five.” He told a story about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error. That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “</span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/09/inhofe-debate-gw/"><span style="font-family:arial;">hoax</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.”<br /><br />That doesn’t mean there aren’t still legitimate questions about the science. Evolution is about as well settled a theory as gravity, but there are still gaps and contradictions in the evolutionary data. But the inherent imperfection of science isn’t a refutation of evolution – despite the claims of creationists. Similarly, it isn’t a refutation of global warming. What other basis do we have for formulating policy? Psychics?<br /><br />My friend, the legendary science fiction writer and physicist David Brin has </span><a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/david_brin/2010/02/11/distinguishing_climate_deniers_from_skeptics"><span style="font-family:arial;">an excellent blog post at Salon</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on the distinction between legitimate climate science skeptics and crazy climate science deniers. Perhaps the most salient distinction is the necessary humility of the former: “Skeptics first admit that they are non-experts, in the topic at hand. And that experts know more than they do.” Anyone who questions the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject should begin by acknowledging the high likelihood that he is wrong. Yes, it is possible that the consensus is wrong – there have been instances in history when that has been the case. But they are rare in comparison with the instances when the scientific consensus has been correct.<br /><br />And climate science has been progressing pretty dramatically in recent decades. As David notes: <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[T]he Skeptic is keenly aware that, after 4,000 years of jokes about hapless weathermen who could not prophecy accurately beyond a few hours, we recently entered a whole new era. People now plan (tentatively) as far as 14 days ahead, based on a science that's grown spectacularly adept, faster than any other. Now, with countless lives and billions of dollars riding on the skill and honesty of several thousand brilliant experts, the Skeptic admits that these weather and climate guys are pretty damn smart.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />The whole notion that the consensus behind AGW is some kind of a hoax is absurd on its face. As David points out: <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[T]he Young Guns in any scientific field... the post-docs and recently-tenured junior professors... are always on the lookout for chinks and holes in the current paradigm, where they can go to topple Nobel Prize winners and make a rep for themselves, in very much the manner of Billy the Kid! (Try looking into the history of weather modeling, and see just how tough these guys really are.)</span><br /></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">This is a crucial point. For the core Denier narrative is that every single young atmospheric scientist is a corrupt or gelded coward. Not a few, or some, or even most... but every last one of them! Only that can explain why none of them have "come out." (And note, Exxon and Fox have even offered lavish financial reward for any that do.) </span></blockquote></span>Brin exaggerates the point only slightly. There may be isolated skeptics within the field – but they don’t amount to any major schism within the broader consensus. It is one thing to be uncertain about the science. It is another thing to be certain that the science is wrong. Indeed, it is fair to assume that anyone who dismisses the whole thing as some kind of fraud or conspiracy is blinded by ideology or partisanship.<br /><br />It is unfortunate that ideology and partisanship have become so polarized that even science is increasingly viewed through those prisms. You would think that as the scientific consensus behind AGW has strengthened over the past decade that the public’s agreement with that consensus would also have increased. And that is, indeed, the case with Democrats. But it has been exactly the opposite with Republicans as the </span><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/107569/climatechange-views-republicandemocratic-gaps-expand.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">issue has become more politicized</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5O1QY8MTLUaFwFTc0bUgl4BcjYTRWSK0EAfl-WP-yTwIgUyCvmXWEra6OHcrbwhAzrWRgs4qmgViqz7QDKmLiXHUs_CUnz3yDNTNPaZrYWnU6hC3MfswP1FJFz41ojCljyrjwBvGyB8k/s1600-h/gallup+climate+change+1.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437626405428438386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 260px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5O1QY8MTLUaFwFTc0bUgl4BcjYTRWSK0EAfl-WP-yTwIgUyCvmXWEra6OHcrbwhAzrWRgs4qmgViqz7QDKmLiXHUs_CUnz3yDNTNPaZrYWnU6hC3MfswP1FJFz41ojCljyrjwBvGyB8k/s400/gallup+climate+change+1.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPEbidR7YZQg4zi51bHyXKmaGOfmErNCdvnsXhqZPGE3p4RlFW4kRBPEY7Ugv0w-Pb6L6NcJmLPEtSdzj-_wrFa8_BOOaEkuKWeOrbA3yXWWKuqWKB1Kj2M7BfZV4RtNEQL6XsufOv1qI/s1600-h/gallup+climate+change+2.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437626889695221938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 246px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPEbidR7YZQg4zi51bHyXKmaGOfmErNCdvnsXhqZPGE3p4RlFW4kRBPEY7Ugv0w-Pb6L6NcJmLPEtSdzj-_wrFa8_BOOaEkuKWeOrbA3yXWWKuqWKB1Kj2M7BfZV4RtNEQL6XsufOv1qI/s400/gallup+climate+change+2.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtI3cW14o-4-mJgSYGADllIg5dXO-j74xYDYes-ksMTZPBrOdTAwZtZOg7L68hqP3LO4BoKbN0siaHL1DOuTOBrkB5aR0FzEGp2fpiit0-8LZl5hjJk5kMjdv5aepV_Nt57n2DHf-d5N8/s1600-h/gallup+climate+change+3.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437627283773247730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 272px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtI3cW14o-4-mJgSYGADllIg5dXO-j74xYDYes-ksMTZPBrOdTAwZtZOg7L68hqP3LO4BoKbN0siaHL1DOuTOBrkB5aR0FzEGp2fpiit0-8LZl5hjJk5kMjdv5aepV_Nt57n2DHf-d5N8/s400/gallup+climate+change+3.bmp" border="0" /></a>When it comes to global warming, partisanship is a bigger predictor of a person’s views than is education. Back in 2008, </span><br /></span><a href="http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming"><span style="font-family:arial;">Pew undertook a poll</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that confirmed the idea that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe the science regarding AGW. And with Democrats, higher education levels correlated to an increased belief in the science, as one might expect. But inexplicably with Republicans the opposite was the case: Higher educations levels correlated to a </span><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/the-climate-cha/"><span style="font-family:arial;">decreased belief in that science</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><p><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuaUw0hfLkHLiinujXc4waaRd8EfJuWv_hdoV3wsQJoQMIPJas4G4J9DdsCJ3pozZT2BcqEE9s3cyiCCY9I_no-oJFbQuuDxBptogskTj4EwDB9xKGwrgZ5l3ph9mcCeSspDDgPgyaywA/s1600-h/party+and+education.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437629360075222946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 271px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 323px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuaUw0hfLkHLiinujXc4waaRd8EfJuWv_hdoV3wsQJoQMIPJas4G4J9DdsCJ3pozZT2BcqEE9s3cyiCCY9I_no-oJFbQuuDxBptogskTj4EwDB9xKGwrgZ5l3ph9mcCeSspDDgPgyaywA/s400/party+and+education.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;">The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.<br /><br />I’m not sure what the explanation for that might be. Perhaps it is the case that better educated Republicans are more likely to seek out and consume media that confirm their beliefs than their less educated co-partisans. It might also be the case that they are more confident in their views or feel more compelled to adhere to the orthodoxy of their party. In any event, it’s strange.<br /><br />Of course, a majority of Republicans also </span><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/Majority-Republicans-Doubt-Theory-Evolution.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">don’t believe in evolution</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_hrbDc9D5fVmH2CpmTr9LPKrbfXgs3km3gMXZT4ab7HYYcqS8TMlkbklYB3B-Uai8U1hmDMez7UofprGUgb6yOGIkgGjwfhCyhtOle5aM4VXsv39kZ8JxBFrmd9rh0V5ZG3iaeOipPQY/s1600-h/evolution+by+party.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437630476834613890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 364px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 272px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_hrbDc9D5fVmH2CpmTr9LPKrbfXgs3km3gMXZT4ab7HYYcqS8TMlkbklYB3B-Uai8U1hmDMez7UofprGUgb6yOGIkgGjwfhCyhtOle5aM4VXsv39kZ8JxBFrmd9rh0V5ZG3iaeOipPQY/s400/evolution+by+party.bmp" border="0" /></a>Unfortunately, partisanship seems to be increasingly shaping people’s views on issues rather than the other way around. Partisanship is another form of tribalism which seems to cause adherents to <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/04/brink-lindsey/partisanship-still-half-empty/">conform their views on a range of issues</a> to those of their tribe – including beliefs about factual issues:<span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other.”<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />These days, if you know someone’s partisan affiliation there is a very good chance you will know more or less their exact position on a wide range of issues – even if those issues are largely factual or otherwise not inherently related to each other in any kind of obvious way.<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />In the case of beliefs about global warming, you could say that Democrats are just as likely as Republicans to be influenced by partisanship. But there is a difference. You don’t need partisanship to explain adherence to the overwhelming scientific consensus. Indeed, one would assume that is the default position. What other basis do you have for forming an opinion about an essentially scientific question? You don’t need partisanship to explain it. It is only when beliefs diverge from the scientific consensus do you need some other explanation. Assuming most people do not have an in depth understanding of the underlying science, which is complex to say the least, it makes perfect sense for a lay person to accept the consensus of the experts in the field. There is much less basis – other than ideology or partisanship – for a lay person without a strong grounding in the science to reject that consensus. There is almost always some contradictory data or flaws in any area of science this complex. But that isn’t the same as disproving the consensus conclusions.<br /><br />And it’s not like the theoretical underpinning of AGW is a radical new concept. It has been 150 years since John Tyndall discovered that CO2 traps heat. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules in the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is about as well-established as gravity. Tyndall’s discovery happened at about the same time that the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. Since then humans have been pumping out carbon into the atmosphere at increasing rates to where today we are putting something like 90 million tons of it into the air <em><strong>every day</strong></em>. What do you think happens to all that carbon? What is the theory that would cause one to believe it isn’t warming the planet – in denial of the observable heating of the planet that one would predict?<br /><br />Even if you assume a large stochastic element to the process, there should be some non-trivial probability that the consensus understates the magnitude of the problem. In other words, if there is a large element of randomness or uncertainly, the problem could actually be much worse than we think.<br /><br />While brings me around to my final point. I’ve mentioned before the "</span><a title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle"><span style="font-family:arial;">precautionary principle</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">" which basically says: “If an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action."<br /><br />Dick Cheney invoked a variation of the precautionary principle with his so-called "</span><a title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine"><span style="font-family:arial;">One-Percent Doctrine</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:" "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."<br /><br />To state it in terms of the Cheney variation of the precautionary principle: If there is a one-percent chance that continuing to pump anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would cause catastrophic climate change, the burden of proof should fall on those who would continue to engage in those activities.<br /><br />If it turns out that the scientific consensus is correct – or that it <em><strong>understates</strong></em> the actual extent of the problem – then the costs of measures we might take now to mitigate that harm would be vastly outweighed by the harms avoided.<br /><br />But what if we are wrong and the problem is less severe than is currently thought? Well, we will have made our economy more energy efficient (like the huge reduction in our energy/GDP ratio in the decade or so after the oil shock of the early ‘70’s), saving money in the long term. We will be sending less money to the Saudi royal family, the thugs running Iran, Hugo Chavez, and ExxonMobil, among others (maybe even allowing us to reduce somewhat the $700 billion a year we spend on the military). We will be pumping fewer pollutants into our atmosphere. And we will be more competitive in many of the key technologies and industries of the 21st Century. In short, we will have somewhat accelerated the end of the Age of Petroleum (good riddance, I say).<br /><br />Reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases, and carbon dioxide in particular (which also contributes to ocean acidification – another huge problem), seems to me like </span><a title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal"><span style="font-family:arial;">Pascal’s Wager</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: The downside if we take those steps and they are unnecessary is a lot better than the downside if they are necessary and we don’t take them. This would be true even if the probability of each case was equal. But the probability isn’t equal: Our best science tells us that the probability of anthropogenic global warming is greater than the probability that it isn’t taking place.<br /><br />If the minority of climate scientists who deny the consensus are right and we accelerate our transition from carbon-based fuels faster than we otherwise would have, what’s the downside? The <em><strong>conservative</strong></em> approach is to invest in the future and seek to scale back our radical experiment on the planet’s fragile atmosphere in the face of – at best, giving the skeptics the benefit of the doubt – our uncertain knowledge of its long term impacts.<br /><br />IMHO, it is a better policy than … Al Gore jokes.<br /></span></span></span><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-76681903448776042422010-02-05T16:19:00.001-08:002010-02-06T11:22:31.317-08:00out of control<span style="font-family:arial;">In a new historic benchmark of obstructionism, one Senator, Republican Shelby of Alabama, has put a “blanket hold” on all of President Obama’s appointees awaiting confirmation in the Senate unless he gets billions of dollars of pork for his state. More on that below.<br /><br />The Senate is broken.<br /><br />I’ve written about this before </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/12/unhealthy-politics.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/01/nihilism.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. But it has gotten worse.<br /><br />As I </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/12/unhealthy-politics.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> back in December:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The inherently anti-Democratic features of the Senate (where the 500,000 residents of Wyoming have the same voting power as 36 million Californians) have been greatly exacerbated by the now routine invocation of the filibuster, preventing a bill from coming up for a vote. This is a relatively recent development. That would be bad enough if we had two functioning political parties. But the Republican Party has become essentially nihilistic, refusing altogether to engage in the formulation of policy or any other serious efforts at actual governance. When you combine these two developments – the need for 60 votes in the Senate for even the most routine matters along with party-line obstructionism by a caucus consisting of 40 Senators – you have come very close to producing the complete failure of governance that Republicans hope will further their electoral prospects – even if it prevents Congress from addressing the nation’s problems.<br /></span></blockquote><br />Yesterday, Scott Brown was sworn in as the 41st Republican Senator. So now if party-line Republican obstructionism continues governance will have become impossible. “Au contraire,” you might say. “Democrats just need to compromise with Republicans.” But Republicans are not interested in compromise. They want to obstruct any major legislative initiative that President Obama and Congressional Democrats might support. Even if it is one of their own initiatives.<br /><br />Am I being unfair? Let me give you an example.<br /><br />The federal budget deficit has become a big issue. I’ve </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/11/deficit.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">written about it before</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and hope to write another piece on the subject soon. Republicans oppose any and all tax increases despite the fact that federal revenue as a percentage of GDP last year was at its lowest level (14.8%) since 1950 – sixty years ago, before Medicare, Medicaid and many other elements of our modern government. (To put that in perspective, federal spending as a percentage of GDP averaged over 22% under Reagan. So even at Reagan’s spending levels we would have had trillion dollar deficits with our existing tax structure.) Indeed, Republicans continue to urge <em>further</em> tax cuts. They also want increases in military spending and recently have taken to opposing any attempts to reduce the growth in Medicare spending.<br /><br />So what do Republicans actually want to do about the deficit? Their top budget guy in the Senate, Judd Gregg, along with budget committee chairman Kent Conrad, </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010401436.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">proposed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> a bipartisan commission that would come up with a package of deficit reduction proposals that could be accepted or rejected by Congress but not amended. For reasons I won’t go into, I don’t think this proposal would be likely to accomplish much. But I also don’t see any particular harm in it. In any event, the Republican leadership rallied behind it. Here is what Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell </span><a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=111-s20090512-8"><span style="font-family:arial;">had to say about it</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">As I have said many times before, the best way to address the [deficit] crisis is the Conrad-Gregg proposal. . . . It deserves support from both sides of the aisle. … So I urge the administration, once again, to support the Conrad-Gregg proposal. This proposal is our best hope for addressing the out-of-control spending and debt levels that are threatening our Nation's fiscal future.<br /></span></blockquote><p>But then a funny thing happened. President Obama came out in support of it in his </span></p><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address"><span style="font-family:arial;">State of the Union speech</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. It looked like it could actually get enacted.<br /><br />So Republicans filibustered it. The Senate failed to overcome the filibuster by a </span><a href="http://www.opencongress.org/vote/2010/s/5"><span style="font-family:arial;">53 to 46 vote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. But it would have passed with 60 votes if six Republican co-sponsors and McConnell had voted for it. That’s right. <strong>Six Republican Senators co-sponsored it – and then voted against it.</strong> Even worse – they didn’t actually vote against it, they voted against even allowing it to come up for a vote. Had it not been subjected to a filibuster, 53 votes would have been enough for it to pass. </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32047.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">For the record</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, the six hypocritical co-sponsors were: Brownback (R-KS), Crapo (R-ID), Ensign (R-NV), Hutchison (R-TX), Inhofe (R-OK), and "Maverick" McCain (R-AZ).<br /><br />As President Obama </span><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2010/02/03/obama_takes_jobs_pitch_to_nh/"><span style="font-family:arial;">said earlier this week</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in Nashua, NH: </span><br /><p><span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“This failed by seven votes, when seven Republicans who had cosponsored the idea suddenly walked away from their own proposal after I endorsed it,’’ an exasperated Obama told the crowd. “I said, ‘Good idea.’ I turned around, they’re gone. What happened?’’<br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">The editorial page editor of the <em>Washington Post</em> (who tends to echo the Republican party line) </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013101837.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">No single vote by any single senator could possibly illustrate everything that is wrong with Washington today. No single vote could embody the full cynicism and cowardice of our political elite at its worst, or explain by itself why problems do not get solved. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">But here's one that comes close. </span></p></blockquote>President Obama has said he intends to create the commission by executive order but Republican leaders are now threatening not to cooperate, refusing to appoint members.<br /><br />For more deficit hypocrisy (as I <a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2010/01/nihilism.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">noted before</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), you have the recent Republican filibuster of the “pay-as-you-go” budget rules requiring that Congress actually pay for what it enacts. (These are the rules that helped produce record surpluses in the ‘90’s but that Republicans let lapse when Bush took office.) But for sheer reckless irresponsibility, it is hard to beat the Republican filibuster of the increase in the nation’s debt limit required to avoid a default on our national debt. What could be more non-partisan and uncontroversial than honoring the full faith and credit of the US government? Fortunately, both of those measures passed the Senate with 60 Democratic votes. But now Democrats only have 59 votes.<br /><br />It used to be that a Senator might vote to break a filibuster – that is, to let a matter come up for a vote – but then vote against the actual bill. That is how Republicans passed the Medicare Part D bill (</span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/part-d-revisited/"><span style="font-family:arial;">a $9 trillion unfunded liability</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) back in 2003. They got 70 votes to proceed to a vote but only 55 votes on passage. That makes perfect sense. You might be against something but still not be willing to obstruct an “up-or-down vote”. But Republicans are now routinely doing the opposite – attempting to obstruct a vote but then voting for passage. For example, last fall, Senate Republicans spent </span><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2010/02/03/obama_takes_jobs_pitch_to_nh/"><span style="font-family:arial;">several weeks obstructing a vote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on a bill extending unemployment benefits, requiring that it survive three cloture votes. But once it became clear they were eventually going to lose, Republicans all voted for the bill and it passed 98-0. Weeks of obstruction of a bill they voted for. This is now becoming common.<br /><br />Last year, Senate Republicans undertook more filibusters than in all of the 1950’s and 1960’s combined. Two decades worth of filibusters in one year.<br /><br />As bad as all that stuff is, Senate Republicans have just established a new historical benchmark. One Senator, Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put a “blanket hold” on the confirmation of all of President Obama’s appointees (at least 70) pending in the Senate. And the Republican leadership is backing him. What’s at stake? Pork for Alabama. And not just any pork. Tens of billions of dollars for a <em>French</em> company, some of which would ooze into Alabama.<br /><br />A bit of background. There is actually no such thing as a “hold” in the Senate’s rules. It’s just a threat to obstruct the business of the Senate, most of which proceeds by unanimous consent. If a Senator feels really strongly about something he can threaten to blow up the Senate if he doesn’t get his way. Usually the matter is something of great concern to one Senator but of little concern to the Senate as a whole and he gets his way. Sometimes it is an objection to a particular bill or appointee. But often the target of the hold is just an innocent bystander held hostage for unrelated reasons. But never in the history of the Senate has a single Senator held up <strong>all </strong>of a president’s pending appointees. This is taking obstruction to an entirely new level.<br /><br />So what has Shelby willing to blow up the entire Senate? He wants the Air Force to award a contract for refueling tankers worth at least $40 billion to the French-based Airbus consortium instead of to its American competitor, Boeing. The aircraft would be assembled in Alabama. Coincidentally, the political action committee of Airbus’s US partner, Northrop Grumman, has contributed over $100,000 to Shelby (and that is </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/shelbys-blanket-hold-puts_n_450934.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">only part of the largesse</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> Shelby has collected in connection with this project).<br /><br />Surely, Shelby’s fellow Republicans are outraged by this behavior, right? Actually, no. In fact yesterday, for some reason, Shelby couldn’t personally make it to the Senate floor to impose his blanket hold, so Senate Republican leader </span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/5/834168/-McConnell-carries-Shelbys-water"><span style="font-family:arial;">McConnell did it for him</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. So this has now become a Republican hold not just a Shelby hold. (Weren’t Republicans supposed to hate the French? And pork? But they are now blowing up the Senate in defense of <em>Le Porc Français</em>. I’m so confused.)<br /><br />The Senate is broken. It has always operated by arcane rules that would shut the institution down if any single member actually insisted they be followed to the letter. (If you don’t believe me, just read </span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/28/14202/2303"><span style="font-family:arial;">this explanation</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of what a “hold” really is from a procedural standpoint.) It has always operated on the basis of certain unwritten rules that assume it is some sort of club of gentlemen who will always find ways of working together in a collegial manner. Yes, the opposition party can filibuster, but only occasionally and only on matters of deep conviction (like denying civil rights to people of color). Yes, a single Senator can put a hold on a bill or a nomination, but that power is used sparingly. But if one entire party chooses to obstruct all the major business of the chamber, for no purpose other than to cause the party in power to fail, it simply can’t function. The exception has now become the rule.<br /><br />What’s the solution? It’s time to get rid of the filibuster. That is a big, weighty topic that I’m not going to tackle at length here. And I have little hope that it will ever actually happen. But we should all be clamoring for it. This is not a radical step. The filibuster as we know it today is a </span><a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/the_filibuster_and_family_full.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">recent development</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></p></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUvN1lmzP4jEYH4eJ5r5O-R-hJLm6j-NBUsCa3yPkm0kZuIC5i4ukhTu1jIrFKi0tYEQWb9nkcB_rBk2tzEPPT4t3sxsEWO_meuQKbXkR6UBCr5xk1ReIrwfqFH1Cde9HKI_SFCcEf1Eo/s1600-h/filibuster+chart+2.jpg"><span style="font-family:arial;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434918759204798914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 206px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUvN1lmzP4jEYH4eJ5r5O-R-hJLm6j-NBUsCa3yPkm0kZuIC5i4ukhTu1jIrFKi0tYEQWb9nkcB_rBk2tzEPPT4t3sxsEWO_meuQKbXkR6UBCr5xk1ReIrwfqFH1Cde9HKI_SFCcEf1Eo/s400/filibuster+chart+2.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">The founders of this country debated the idea of requiring supermajority votes and decided against it except in limited cases specified in the Constitution like impeachment (a step not to be undertaken lightly) and ratifying treaties (the founders were skeptical of foreign entanglements). The problem with a supermajority requirement (which we effectively now have in the Senate) is that it puts the country in the position where no one can govern. </span><span style="font-family:arial;">That is what has brought California to its knees (where a two-thirds vote is of the legislature is required to pass a budget). You can have a 59-vote majority in the Senate and still not be able to pass legislation. So who do you hold accountable in that situation? No one is in charge. No organization can function with no one able to govern and no ultimate accountability.<br /><br />Senate rules require a two-thirds vote to change its rules. But there is a twist. The Constitution says that each House of Congress can make its own rules. And the Supreme Court has consistently held over over the years that a legislature may not bind its successors. One Congress cannot make rules that control future Congresses. </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;">Every two years, a new Congress convenes. The current Congress is the “111th Congress.” When the 112th Congress convenes in January of 2011, it can adopt its own rules by majority vote. As a matter of convention, the Senate acts as if it is a “continuing body” when it comes to the continuity of its rules. But as we are seeing now with things like abuse of the filibuster and holds, convention is just that – convention. If a future Senate decides to abandon that convention, as a Constitutional matter it can. The problem, of course, is that every Senator has an ego the size of a supernova and doesn’t want to surrender his or her own ability to obstruct the work of the Senate. And there is a “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias"><span style="font-family:arial;">status quo bias</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” that causes people to defend existing things (like the Electoral College) that they would have trouble justifying as an initial matter.<br /><br />The filibuster is not in the Constitution and it was never intended as a routine supermajority requirement. It has just evolved into one and only very recently. It has made it nearly impossible to tackle big problems. Indeed, when was the last time Congress successfully tackled a big problem? I would say the last time was dealing with the deficit in the ‘90’s. Since then? Immigration reform? Failed. Privatizing Social Security (however misguided)? Failed. Addressing global warming and energy? Unlikely. Reform of a broken health care system? Increasingly doubtful. In every case, the hang-up has been or is the Senate. During the Bush years, cutting taxes and creating a big new entitlement program, without paying for any of it, didn’t require any tough choices. And even the tax cuts were enacted by abusing the budget rules to allow them to pass by a bare majority.<br /><br />The Senate is broken. And if we don’t fix it, it will break the country. </span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><strong>UPDATE:<br /></strong><br />I am humbled. Gail Collins </span><a title="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/opinion/06collins.html?pagewanted=" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/opinion/06collins.html?pagewanted=print"><span style="font-family:arial;">said the same thing</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> much better than me in less than 1000 words.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-12225217650295491722010-01-28T22:47:00.000-08:002010-01-28T22:53:33.941-08:00nihilism<div><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama’s first </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-addresshttp:/www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/remarks-of-president-barack-obama-address-to-joint-session-of-congress/"><span style="font-family:arial;">State of the Union address</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> last night was brilliant. If you didn’t watch it, do so (you can </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2010-state-union-address"><span style="font-family:arial;">see it here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). I’m not going to summarize it here. But there is one point I’d to highlight:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. …To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together.<br /></span></blockquote><br />As it turns out, there were two votes taken in the Senate today that demonstrate the full extent of the abject irresponsibility and nihilism of Republicans in Congress.<br /><br />The more important vote today was to raise the country’s debt limit. Without that vote the ability of the US government to borrow in global capital markets would have ended by the end of next month. The measure passed on a straight party line vote: 60-39. Not a single Republican voted for the measure.<br /><br />So what possible Republican “message” could have been intended with this vote? If the increase in the debt limit was not approved, the United States would not be able to pay its debts. If you think the financial crisis of 2008 risked a global financial meltdown, try having the US default on its debt. Talk about the “nuclear option” – you’re playing with financial apocalypse. The full faith and credit of the US government is the foundation of the global financial system. Are we supposed to conclude that had the new Republican senator from Massachusetts already been sworn in today, Republicans would have forced a US default?<br /><br />Let’s give Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume it was just some kind of reckless and irresponsible “symbolic” vote made possible by the fact they refuse to take any actual responsibility for governance. What is the symbolism? That international investors should question the security of their investments in US government debt? (Actually, </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/rep-mark-kirk-r-il-i-told-china-not-to-believe-us-budget-numbers.php?ref=fpb%20t"><span style="font-family:arial;">back in June</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, Republican Congressman Mark Kirk, now running for the Senate in Illinois, met with Chinese leaders and told them, in his words, “that the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed.”) That would only bump up the interest rates we pay on our national debt and further increase the deficit. Maybe they were trying to say that we have to get serious about deficit reduction.<br /><br />That leads us to the other vote of the day. The senate voted on so-called “pay-as-you-go” budget rules that require that tax cuts or spending increases be matched by spending cuts or tax increases. In other words, Congress has to pay for what it enacts. It was these rules, which prevailed during the ‘90’s, that were largely responsible for the record budget surpluses inherited by President Bush. And it was Bush and a Republican Congress allowing those rules to lapse in 2002 that cleared the way for the record budget deficits that followed. The measure passed the Senate today 60-40, on a straight party line vote. Again, not a single Republican voted for this fiscal discipline. Not one. Not Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins or Mr. Fiscal Responsibility, Judd Gregg or “Maverick” John McCain.<br /><br />As I’ve </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/11/deficit.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">noted before</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, over 75 percent of our national debt was racked up under just three Republican presidents – Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. That is the debt that we must pay down or continue to finance with interest. The interest (and the interest on the interest) just for that Republican debt will amount to trillions of dollars over the next decade. Is there some symbolic message that we are supposed to glean from the refusal of Republicans to allow the US government to finance the debt accumulated under their leadership?<br /><br />As President Obama noted in his speech last night:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus<br />of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.<br /></span></blockquote><br />In January of last year, before President Obama took office, the Congressional Budget Office </span><a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9957/01-07-Outlook.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">estimated</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that the 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion. And that was based on more optimistic assumptions than proved to be the case. And it did not take into account any tax cuts, job creation efforts or other economic stimulus measures. That is the fiscal mess President Obama inherited.<br /><br />Let’s take a look at the major items that turned record budget surpluses into record deficits. I went back and took a look at the 2001 Congressional vote approving the tax cuts that blew a $2 trillion hole in our country’s finances. It passed the Senate on a 58-33 vote. (What? I thought 60 votes are required to pass anything in the Senate?) By my count, 22 of the Senate Republicans who voted today against allowing the government to finance its debt were in the Senate at the time of the 2001 vote. Of those 22, 21 voted for the Bush tax cuts. (To his credit, John McCain voted for fiscal responsibility before he voted against it.) The story is pretty much the same with regard to the 2003 tax cuts, which resulted in another trillion dollars or so of debt. By my rough count, 24 Senate Republicans who voted against today’s measure were in the Senate then and, again, all but McCain voted for the 2003 tax cuts. (That one was actually a 50-50 tie in the Senate – broken by the Dark One, Vice President Cheney. Again, you will note, 50 inexplicably is less than 60.) I’m not going to bother to repeat this exercise with respect to the two other major budget-busting measures of the Bush era – the Iraq war vote and subsequent spending votes (which I am confident that 100% of today’s Senate Republicans who were in the body at that time supported) and the Medicare Part D measure, which added another trillion dollars or so of debt over its first decade.<br /><br />The Center On Budget and Policy Priorities undertook an </span><a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036"><span style="font-family:arial;">excellent analysis</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of the factors underlying our current deficits. If you have the same affliction I do and are actually interested in this kind of thing, I recommend reading it. But assuming you don’t, it is pretty well summarized in this handy chart:</span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphenbbB2xTVwkJBAP7OOImLM3oglQm0751dDGiaKmVGhkHepn_lEqG_qTG2fXkmE_x9AK_GKhPLr4rknNymoLZcMOIGdJGTBOVy959kbl9bSDoI1OqlU7Y63KEOUEsVvWyAESzUztYw_Gk/s1600-h/deficits.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432050117678744818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 301px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 358px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphenbbB2xTVwkJBAP7OOImLM3oglQm0751dDGiaKmVGhkHepn_lEqG_qTG2fXkmE_x9AK_GKhPLr4rknNymoLZcMOIGdJGTBOVy959kbl9bSDoI1OqlU7Y63KEOUEsVvWyAESzUztYw_Gk/s400/deficits.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">So, then, what was the symbolism of today’s votes? The guys who ran up our country’s debt would bring down the global financial system to score points against the Democrats?<br /><br />There is a word for that – nihilism.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">That is the “Republican response” to President Obama’s State of the Union address.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-61871753552055720062010-01-12T14:49:00.000-08:002010-01-12T15:54:15.859-08:00underpants of mass destruction<span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Last month, on December 4th, my friend, <em>Strategic News Service</em> publisher Mark Anderson, </span><a href="http://www.tapsns.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/russ-daggatt-guest-post-2/"><span style="font-family:arial;">posted on his blog</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> part of one of our email exchanges which included the following in the context of global warming: </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The so-called “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine"><span style="font-family:georgia;">One-Percent Doctrine</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">,” attributable to Dick Cheney, is described thusly: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”<br /><br />This is a variation of the “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle"><span style="font-family:georgia;">precautionary principle</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">”: “If an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.” </span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">If there is a one-percent chance that continuing to pump anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would cause catastrophic climate change, the burden of proof falls on those who would continue to engage in those activities.</span> </span></p></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">Four days later, on December 8th, Thomas Friedman devoted a <em>New York Times</em> column (“</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1"><span style="font-family:arial;">Going Cheney on Climate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) to pretty much the exact same point, also citing Cheney’s One-Percent Doctrine and the precautionary principle.<br /><br />Then, later in the month, I wrote a </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/12/health-care-costs.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">blog post</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> about health care costs where I recommended various articles on the subject, including these:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">I would start with the excellent piece by </span><a href="http://www.gawande.com/bio.htm"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Atul Gawande</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> in <em>The New Yorker</em> (“</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande"><span style="font-family:georgia;">The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">”). … Another good piece on medical costs is </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care"><span style="font-family:georgia;">How American Health Care Killed My Father</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> by David Goldhill in <em>The Atlantic</em>.<br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />Two days later, David Brooks had a <em>New York Times </em></span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/opinion/25brooks.html?_r=1"><span style="font-family:arial;">column</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> where he wrote this:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">This year, magazines had a powerful effect on the health care debate. Atul Gawande’s piece, “The Cost Conundrum,” in <em>The New Yorker</em>, was </span><a title="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande"><span style="font-family:georgia;">the most influential essay of 2009,</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> and David Goldhill’s “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in <em>The Atlantic</em>, </span><a title="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care"><span style="font-family:georgia;">explained why</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> the U.S. needs fundamental health reform.<br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />I found these two coincidences deeply troubling. Had my insights really become so conventional they were indistinguishable from those of mainstream pundits? And <em><strong>conservative</strong></em> mainstream pundits, at that.<br /><br />For that reason, it is with great trepidation that I begin this post by citing … a <em>New York Times</em> column by David Brooks (and without even the mitigating circumstance of beating him to the punch). Last week, he wrote of our current national freak-out over the failed Underpants Bomber:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.<br /><br />Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.<br /><br />But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign … There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.<br /><br />Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have<br />gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string<br />the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.<br /><br />Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices.<br />…<br /><br />In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. …<br /><br />Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions. …<br /><br />It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.<br /></span></blockquote><br />Exactly.<br /><br />A big part of the problem, of course, is hyper-partisanship on the right. Responding to childish political attacks almost inevitably creates a childish dialogue. The nearly identical case of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, during the previous administration provides something along the lines of a controlled experiment. The same actions that were met with approval or nonchalance by Republicans in that case are the subject of feigned outrage today. Our formerly reclusive vice president released a </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31054.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">truly unhinged rant</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> against our president (that has to be read to be believed). In all of the spittle he spews at our commander in chief he neglects to condemn … you know, <em><strong>the actual bomb attempt and its perpetrator</strong></em>. The Dark One asserts that President Obama, “seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war.” But, of course, that is <em><strong>exactly</strong></em> what Cheney’s team did in the shoe bomber case – they read Reid his Miranda rights, gave him a lawyer and proceeded to convict him and put him away for life in the Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado. I don’t recall Republicans or Democrats directing a torrent of abuse at Bush and Cheney then.<br /><br />And it’s not like trying a defendant in military commissions allows the government to disregard all the Constitutional safeguards of a civilian prosecution. The </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/11/gop-criticism-of-obama-on_n_419203.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">defendant is also given a lawyer</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and torture is still illegal. Apparently, Cheney is having trouble getting over the idea that he can’t torture whomever he wants and imprison them forever with no due process of law -- while the American people cower in fear demanding that Daddy protect them. But that old codependency between Cheney and Al Qaeda just doesn’t seem to be working its mojo the way it used to. </span><a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/11/cnn-poll-americans-confident-obama-can-handle-terrorism/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Nearly two-third of Americans</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> have confidence in the ability of the Obama administration to protect the country from terrorist attacks – a number that is actually up in recent months.<br /><br />[Bear in mind, this attack on President Obama is coming from the guy who in May of 2001 was named, in </span><a href="http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=fs-108-2-99"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Bush’s words</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, to "oversee the development of a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm." The Cheney Terrorism Task Force never met prior to 9-11.]<br /><br />Cheney also whined about President Obama’s “low-key response” – feeling, presumably, that the president had missed a perfectly good opportunity to terrorize the American people.<br /><br />Similarly, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, who has never missed an opportunity to turn national security into a partisan issue, criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for appearing "bored" on the Christmas weekend talk shows. "There was no intensity, there was no show of emotion," he said. King obviously would have preferred the female Democrat to appear hysterical and irrational. The GOP’s #1 security guy in the House also had this </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/King_Use_word_terrorism_more.html?showall"><span style="font-family:arial;">great exchange</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> with the host of ABC’s <em>This Week</em>:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;"><strong>George Stephanopoulos</strong>: “You are saying someone should be held accountable. Name one other specific recommendation the president could implement right now to fix this.”<br /><br /><strong>Peter King</strong>: "I think one main thing would be to – just himself to use the word terrorism more often."<br /></span></blockquote><br />The “main thing” President Obama could do to make us safer would be to use the world “terrorism” more often? That’s the Republican solution? I feel safer already.<br /><br />Secretary Napolitano took a lot of heat for saying that the “system worked”. What she actually said (</span><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/72207/if-you-take-her-out-of-context-then-yes-napolitano-said-something-dumb"><span style="font-family:arial;">you can read her actual statement here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) was the “once the incident occurred, the system worked.” Now, it’s true Hot Pants’ father, a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly told the US Embassy in that country that he had concerns his son was becoming radicalized. My own father had the same concern when I went back East to law school – he was convinced I would return a liberal. He was right, of course, as was the father in this case. But there are a lot of fathers (and mothers) in the world concerned about the paths their children might be travelling. That doesn’t necessarily constitute “actionable intelligence.” Personally, I always take it seriously when I get an unsolicited message from a Nigerian banker offering to help me. But it’s not like, say, alarmed CIA briefers interrupting a presidential vacation with the warning, “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike_in_US"><span style="font-family:arial;">Bin Laden determined to strike in US</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.” Doing absolutely nothing in response to that kind of intelligence – now THAT would be recklessly irresponsible. Nonetheless, I think most people agree that more should have been done with the Nigerian warning.<br /><br />But on one level, the system <em><strong>did</strong></em> work. As Bruce Schneier wrote (“</span><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/07/schneier.security/index.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Stop the panic on air security</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” – a good little piece):<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The security checkpoints … forced whoever made the bomb to construct a much worse bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or another reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc homebrew -- and a much more inefficient one,<br />involving a syringe, and 20 minutes in the lavatory, and we don't know exactly<br />what else -- that didn't explode. …<br /><br />The Underwear Bomber is precisely the sort of story we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare events. Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we've had to deal with throughout most of our species' existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks modern society forces us to face. We exaggerate spectacular rare events, and downplay familiar and common ones. … I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying.<br /><br />But that's not the way we think. The more an event is talked about, the more probable we think it is. The more vivid our thoughts about the event are -- again, think television -- the more easily we remember it and the more convincing it is. So when faced with a very available and highly vivid event like the Underwear Bomber … we overreact. We get scared.<br /><br />And once we're scared, we need to "do something" -- even if that something doesn't<br />make sense and is ineffective. … Yes, it's security theater, but it makes us feel safer. …<br /></span></blockquote><br />As our favorite statistics whiz, Nate Silver, </span><a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">notes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get <strong>one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures</strong>.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been <strong>one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown</strong>. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been <strong>one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne</strong>. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, <strong>the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade</strong>. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning. </span></p></blockquote>As Nate notes in </span><a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/skies-are-as-friendly-as-ever-911-al.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">another post</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Since the beginning of commercial air travel, a total of about 6,500 people have been killed as the result of Violent Passenger Incidents -- nearly half of those, or 2,995, came on 9/11 itself. … [T]he innovation of secure cockpit doors and increased scrutiny of suspicious persons at flight school make a literal repeat of 9/11 unlikely …<br /><br />[W]ith the exception of the 1930s, when there wasn't really enough commercial air travel to provide for a sufficient sample size, and the 1990s, a decade which was a positive outlier in so many ways, the death rate from VPIs has been remarkably constant from decade to decade.</span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5ieXw28ZUpg/S0G1itsRrkI/AAAAAAAABdU/5DTADxpcsi8/s1600-h/airsafe4.png"></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxgCYxo0JdLZ_TKl5m_TPcq3vLhGeTSFguvF3j1kgLLkNWVs3RnUjm0RXUBFuaqGB6LxxycM0skwAIIGVtLr_uW8hHC7x1TNSGecoYXsyVSBB9EF44NPZJ6_T3eBqJjC-6GzvdMXerwUk/s1600-h/VPI+deaths.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5425995934798941442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 303px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxgCYxo0JdLZ_TKl5m_TPcq3vLhGeTSFguvF3j1kgLLkNWVs3RnUjm0RXUBFuaqGB6LxxycM0skwAIIGVtLr_uW8hHC7x1TNSGecoYXsyVSBB9EF44NPZJ6_T3eBqJjC-6GzvdMXerwUk/s400/VPI+deaths.bmp" border="0" /></a><br />Even though no one died in this incident, it may nonetheless have been a “success”. As Andrew Sullivan </span><a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/why-didnt-he-just-blow-himself-up-in-the-toilet.html#more"><span style="font-family:arial;">notes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">I keep hearing this even described as a failed terrorist attack on an airplane. But was it really? … Think about it. First, what is the major goal of terrorism? It is not to bring down airplanes. It is not to destroy the West. It is, pure and simple, to create terror in people. Why? Because when people are afraid they overreact. … If the intent of al Qaeda in this latest instance was to bring down an airplane, then it failed. But if its intent was to create fear and overreaction, then it succeeded<br /></span></blockquote></span>Heck, 19 bearded fanatics with boxcutters took advantage of a couple of security lapses (unlocked cockpit doors and crew training that emphasized cooperation with hijackers to get the plane back on the ground) and got us bogged down in a couple of wars in the Middle East for a decade or more spending trillions of dollars. Let’s see what a guy with a detonator in his diaper can do. Maybe cause our air transportation system to break down on a busy holiday weekend and provide a pretext for partisan division of the country.<br /><br />Dick Cheney certainly isn’t alone when it comes to wild overreaction. As Gail Collins said (in a </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/opinion/07collins.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">different context</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">): “Personally, in these moments of crisis, I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way.” </span><a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/74085-afghanistan-strategy-faces-mounting-challenges-in-year-ahead"><span style="font-family:arial;">Cue Lieberman</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), for one, said last weekend that Yemen would be "tomorrow's war" if pre-emptive action is not taken to root out al-Qaeda there.<br /></span></blockquote>Now would that Yemen war be <em><strong>before or after </strong></em></span><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/10/ftn/main2908476.shtml"><span style="font-family:arial;">attacking Iran</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">? But why stop with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Yemen? <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"We can see the more we learn about the Christmas bombing attempt we could have another conflict on our hands in Yemen, and likewise in Somalia," John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush, told The Hill.<br /></span></blockquote></span>We can’t even escalate in Afghanistan without pulling troops out of Iraq. And now we’re supposed to invade and occupy Yemen and Somalia? Just because some guy incinerated his junk? Al Qaeda is not a country. They are a small group of fanatics – more an idea than an army. As Harry Shearer </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/cheneys-game_b_407368.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in <em>Huffington Post</em>: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The problem with pretending we're at war, rather than understanding we're dealing with a criminal syndicate -- like the Mafia -- is that it gets our resources overextended and tied down in geographical areas, like Afghanistan, while the opponent is free to move and relocate (hello, Yemen!, hi, Somalia!). In fact, the war model weakens us, makes us less able to respond nimbly and quietly …In short, we lumber, they scamper.<br /></span></blockquote></span>Personally, I think the best way of reacting to an incident like this is … mockery. What better way to deny Al Qaeda victory than to avoid overreaction and make fun of their competence and masculinity? I mean, the guy barbequed his own meat. Let’s turn THAT into an Al Qaeda recruiting poster. As Jon Stewart </span><a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/stewart-on-underwear-bomber-even-if-the-bomb-works-theres-gonna-be-72-very-disappointed-virgins.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">said</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, “taint full of gunpowder.” He added: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“Even if the bomb works, there’s gonna be 72 very disappointed virgins.”</span> </blockquote></span>Conan O’Brien chimed in: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Legal experts are saying that if he’s convicted, the underwear bomber could be sentenced to life in a federal prison. But even worse, for the rest of his life he’ll be known as 'The Underwear Bomber.'"<br /></span></blockquote></span>Not to be outdone, David Letterman added: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Hear about the guy [who] tried to get his underwear to explode? ... He was wearing a pair of Fruit of the Lunatic."<br /></span></blockquote></span><p>And I leave you with ... Tom Tomorrow:<br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5MYbFXYL3Ien2HKS7ctU_tbzXnqlFUV7Toe5rUtIs1p-7_WAsIFbDGDag-CmsHmVuZ9CUQq0k10TPNIrLFHX5e43QsWuZMTi3kkqRGdKXmLi-CoWcHDsIjvXwlcGMGVp7NhYapDpcCo/s1600-h/underpants.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5425995668887811250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 371px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5MYbFXYL3Ien2HKS7ctU_tbzXnqlFUV7Toe5rUtIs1p-7_WAsIFbDGDag-CmsHmVuZ9CUQq0k10TPNIrLFHX5e43QsWuZMTi3kkqRGdKXmLi-CoWcHDsIjvXwlcGMGVp7NhYapDpcCo/s400/underpants.bmp" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"> [click on </span><a href="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/comics/this_modern_world/2010/01/04/this_modern_world"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">cartoon</span></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-family:arial;"> to enlarge] </span><br /></span></p>There you go.</p><span style="font-size:180%;">Mission Accomplished!</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-25856435008187451732009-12-30T17:12:00.000-08:002009-12-30T20:33:28.055-08:00unhealthy politics<div><span style="font-family:arial;">The continuing health care debate in Congress has highlighted some seriously dysfunctional elements in our nation’s politics. The inherently anti-Democratic features of the Senate (where the 500,000 residents of Wyoming have the same voting power as 36 million Californians) have been greatly exacerbated by the now routine invocation of the filibuster, preventing a bill from coming up for a vote. This is a relatively recent development. That would be bad enough if we had two functioning political parties. But the Republican Party has become essentially nihilistic, refusing altogether to engage in the formulation of policy or any other serious efforts at actual governance. When you combine these two developments – the need for 60 votes in the Senate for even the most routine matters along with party-line obstructionism by a caucus consisting of 40 Senators – you have come very close to producing the complete failure of governance that Republicans hope will further their electoral prospects – even if it prevents Congress from addressing the nation’s problems.<br /><br />Paul Krugman had an excellent column in the <em>New York Times</em> last week (“</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21krugman.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">A Dangerous Dysfunction</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) wherein he notes the filibuster problem:<br /><br /></div></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so<br />far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.<br /><br />The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds,<br />“extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected<br />only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent.<br />But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found<br />themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.<br /><br />Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.<br /><br />First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an<br />attempt to delay action on health care.<br /><br />More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.<br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;"><div><br />James Fallows also has a </span><a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/the_filibuster_and_family_full.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">good post on the filibuster</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (with a lot of good links -- as a prelude to “a gigantic article coming out soon in the <em>Atlantic</em> … which concerns America's ability to address big public problems”):<br /><br /></div></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The significant thing about filibusters through most of U.S. history is that they <em>hardly ever happened</em>. But since roughly the early Clinton years, the threat of filibuster has gone from exception to routine, for legislation and appointments alike, with the result that doing practically anything takes not 51 but 60 votes. So taken for granted is the change that the nation's leading paper can </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/health/policy/20care.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">offhandedly say</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> that 60 votes are "needed to pass their bill." In practice that's correct, but the aberrational nature of this change should not be overlooked. …<br /><br />[A]s the </span><a href="http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/our-broken-senate"><span style="font-family:georgia;">chart below</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"> shows, the huge increase in threatened filibusters came from the Republican minority, after the Democrats took back the Senate in 2007. Since the time covered by this chart, the number of threatened (Republican) filibusters has shot up even more dramatically. Still, whoever is in control, this is a more basic and dangerous threat to the ability of any elected American government to address the big issues of its time. …</span><br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;"><div><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_xUpBDu9cJ-zekXp0Hz1m-cnbU5M9unqFQAR1K20lz0BULsTGLUELPk3GHpFm0PamrSKy8XPNsRBlnMuTo090E6DmM2DJYKUY-h02NeTLVvLh93NpEtBFtvP7Jt6W-lAsWO2-YYaKfZc/s1600-h/filibuster+chart+2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421202948988550930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 206px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_xUpBDu9cJ-zekXp0Hz1m-cnbU5M9unqFQAR1K20lz0BULsTGLUELPk3GHpFm0PamrSKy8XPNsRBlnMuTo090E6DmM2DJYKUY-h02NeTLVvLh93NpEtBFtvP7Jt6W-lAsWO2-YYaKfZc/s400/filibuster+chart+2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[You can view a better version of the same data on this </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cloture_Voting,_U.S._Senate,_1947_to_2008.jpg"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">chart</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;">.]</span><br /><br />[Even as </span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/29/820157/-If-You-Thought-Hoekstras-Attempt-To-Cash-In-On-Terrorism-Was-Bad-..."><span style="font-family:arial;">Republicans are attempting to blame President Obama</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for the recent failed attempt to ignite an incendiary device on a US-bound airliner, the Transportation Security Administrator is without a leader because Republicans are holding up his nomination. Senate Majority Leader Reid </span><a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/81397.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">announced yesterday</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that he would seek a cloture vote on that nomination – <em><strong>requiring 60 votes</strong></em> – as soon as the Senate reconvenes in January. Meanwhile, </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/11/dithering.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Cheney has slithered back out from under his rock</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to </span><a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/cheney-attacks-white-house-hits-back/?hp"><span style="font-family:arial;">attack President Obama</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for actually using the criminal justice system established under the US Constitution to try the suspect in that case. You know, <em><strong>exactly like the Bush administration did</strong></em> back in 2001 under virtually identical circumstances with attempted shoe-bomber </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid_(shoe_bomber)"><span style="font-family:arial;">Richard Reid</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> – now serving a life sentence not at Guantanamo but at the Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado – <em><strong>on US soil!</strong></em> I bet they even read the wannabe shoe-bomber his Miranda rights and gave him a lawyer. </span><span style="font-family:arial;">But I digress ….]<br /><br />Making matters worse, there no longer seems to be any distinction being made on a cloture vote (i.e., the vote ending debate and proceeding to a vote on the bill) and the vote on the substance of the underlying bill. In the past, a Senator might vote to allow a matter to come up for an up-or-down vote while voting against the bill itself. Indeed, that was the rule not the exception. For example, back in 2003 when Republicans enacted the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit (which according to the Medicare trustees created a </span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/part-d-revisited/"><span style="font-family:arial;">$9.4 trillion unfunded liability</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) the cloture vote pass by a </span><a href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=108&session=1&vote=00457"><span style="font-family:arial;">70 to 29 margin</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> while the bill itself passed by a narrower </span><a href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=108&session=1&vote=00459"><span style="font-family:arial;">55 to 44 margin</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. In the case of both the stimulus bill and the health care bill, however, the cloture vote and the vote on the underlying bill were the same. Despite all their demands for a “up-or-down vote” when they controlled the Senate, Republican Senators it seems are no longer willing to permit an up-or-down vote on legislation they oppose as used to commonly be the case.<br /><br />This new de facto requirement of 60 votes for anything to pass the Senate would not be so bad if there were actually something approaching 100 votes in play. But if 40 votes are committed to obstruction from the outset, it’s pretty hard for the system to work.<br /><br />Jonathan Chait has a good article in <em>The New Republic</em> on </span><a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-rise-republican-nihilism"><span style="font-family:arial;">The Rise of Republican Nihilism</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. He does a good job analyzing the nature of Republican opposition to each of President Obama’s three areas of policy priority:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to<br />objectively large problems facing the country. The administration has selected<br />three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform. … In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.<br /></span></blockquote><br />Take the stimulus. At the peak of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, recently inherited from a Republican administration, the stimulus package was able to attract not a single Republican in the House and only three in the Senate (one of whom – Arlen Specter – was subsequently drummed out of the party as a result). In order to attract the bipartisan support it desperately sought, the Obama administration had made the package </span><a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/the-600b-stimulus-program-how-we-got-here.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">about half the size</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that its own Council of Economic Advisors calculated was necessary and tilted much of its composition toward tax cuts (which have little stimulative effect in a liquidity trap when people are likely to save any windfall). The resulting package was almost certainly similar in its general contours to what a President McCain would have proposed. Indeed, one of McCain’s top economic advisors, Mark Zandi (now chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com), </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/business/economy/21stimulus.html?_r=1&scp=3%26sq=obama%2520economic%2520stimulus%26st=cse"><span style="font-family:arial;">recently acknowledged the positive effects of the stimulus</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">… “there was a considerable amount of hand-wringing that [the stimulus] was too small, and I sympathized with that argument,” said Mark Zandi, … Even so, “the stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do — it is contributing to ending the recession,” he added, citing the economy’s third-quarter expansion by a 3.5 percent seasonally adjusted annual rate. “In my view, without the stimulus, G.D.P. would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent. And there are a little over 1.1 million more jobs out there as of October than would have been out there without the stimulus.”</span><br /></blockquote><br />But even the worst economic crisis in 70 years thrust into the lap of a new president seeking bipartisanship wasn’t enough to elicit constructive engagement from Republicans in Congress. Their calculation was that a bad economy would be good for them. The American people be damned.<br /><br />But the area where Republican obstructionism has been most conspicuously on display has been health care reform. To put this in perspective, the basic approach to health care reform that Democrats adopted was one of Republican origin. David Warsh (who publishes the </span><a href="http://www.economicprincipals.com/"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Economic Principals</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> Web site) </span><a href="http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.27/859.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">recounts that history</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (a MUST READ piece, especially for Republicans):<br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Consider how <em><strong>a bipartisan approach devised by middle-of-the-road technocrats for an entrepreneurial Republican</strong></em> became a winning issue for the Democrats and provoked a crisis in the Republican Party.... In November 2004, on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe, [Massachusetts governor Mitt] Romney announced "My plan for Massachusetts health insurance reform.” He was, he wrote, adopting a bipartisan approach. His plan would require no employer mandate or “single-payer” government takeover of the system. Nor would any new taxes be required. But by restraining medical expenses, the measure would lower the cost of health insurance for all.... </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">[The plan] took advantage of a considerable head start, relative to all other states: Massachusetts already put aside as much as $1 billion annually for emergency care of the uninsured. …. And Romney persuaded the Bush Administration to preserve $400 million in annual Medicare funding.... </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Eighteen months later, Romney declared that the problem had been solved. A combination of a series of new no-frills insurance plans and a requirement that even healthy young adults purchase one, plus government subsidies for those unable to afford those basic policies, and increased emphasis on Medicaid for those who qualified under current law would accomplish the goal with no new taxes.... </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">He didn’t like to call it a plan for “universal coverage,” Romney told Time’s Joe Klein;<br />to him it was a “personal responsibility system;” but the net effect would be the same: all Massachusetts citizens would be covered. … “It’s a goal that Democrats and Republicans share, and it has been achieved by a bipartisan effort, through market reforms,” he wrote [</span><a href="http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008213"><span style="font-family:georgia;">in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">]… </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">So a contagious Republican proposal which quickly spread to the Democratic primaries proved to be the proximate cause of landmark legislation... by extending somewhat the principle of federal regulation, it changes the geometry of the medical industrial complex in fundamental ways. As [Jonathan] Chait </span><a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/just-noise?page=0,0"><span style="font-family:georgia;">puts it</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, the proposed statute “prods the system” in myriad ways. It directs money away from wasteful and ineffective treatment in emergency rooms and towards routine care for the previously uninsured. It launches many experiments, large and small, designed to discover effective ways of doing things – everything from computerizing medical records to penalizing hospitals with high infection rates. … [T]he current bill is not the kind of plan that liberals wish they could design from scratch. “<em><strong>Rather, it is a centrist compromise of the best variety, combining the ideas of the now nearly extinct moderate wing of the Republican Party with the smartest bipartisan technocratic reforms</strong></em>.” </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">... The <em>Wall Street Journal</em> fulminated [against President Obama’s heath care reform plan]... the editors wrote. “A popular president might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties.” That, of course, is exactly what Romney attempted and Obama accomplished. Sufficiently clouded by defeat is the editors’ judgment, however, that they no longer seem to recall that they themselves showcased Romney’s </span><a href="http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008213"><span style="font-family:georgia;">“Healthcare for Everyone? We’ve Found a Way”</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> proposal in 2006... </p></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">By most accounts the Massachusetts plan, on which the current Democratic health care reform plan was modeled, has been a big success. The plan has resulted in 97% of Massachusetts residents having health care coverage (vs. something like 83% at the national level). And the real test politically: It is popular. A </span><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/09/28/support_for_mass_health_insurance_overhaul_drops_but_is_still_strong/"><span style="font-family:arial;">poll in October</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> showed that 79% of Massachusetts residents want to keep their reform plan; only 11% of voters there support repeal.<br /><br />So Democrats in Congress forgo the reforms preferred by a strong majority of their base, like a single-payer system, and instead adopt a popular, successful Republican plan as their model for health care reform. It attracts large bipartisan majorities in Congress, right? Just kidding, of course. The only Republican vote for health care reform garnered in either house of Congress was Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana, who is not likely to get reelected in his heavily Democratic New Orleans district where President Obama captured 75% of the vote (Cao only narrowly defeated the indicted – subsequently convicted – incumbent, William Jefferson, infamous for the $90,000 in cash found in his freezer).<br /><br />It would be one thing if Republicans engaged in a serious debate about the actual merits of Congressional proposals. But they have chosen to remain apart from the policy debate altogether, instead spewing lies about things like “death panels” and coverage for illegal immigrants. As Steve Benen noted in the <em>Huffington Post</em> (“</span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-benen/the-long-overdue-debate_b_395910.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">The Long Overdue Debate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) the real policy debate has been among Democrats, not between Democrats and Republicans: </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The United States was supposed to have had a great debate this year about one of the most important domestic policies of them all. With a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address a dysfunctional health care system, the left and right,<br />Democrats and Republicans, would bring their A games, and the public would<br />benefit from the discussion. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">We now know, of course, that Americans were denied that debate, not because of the proposals, but because the right didn't have an A game to bring. Intellectual bankruptcy left conservatives with empty rhetorical quivers. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">But as it turns out, it wasn't too late for the debate, we were just looking in the wrong place. We expected the fight of the generation to occur between the right and left, when the more relevant dispute was between the left and left. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">It's easy to overlook right now, but the quality of the policy debate between competing progressive contingents is infinitely better and more interesting than the policy debate between Democrats and Republicans, which has unfolded in depressing ways over the last eight or nine months. … </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">[N]otice the quality of the arguments conservatives and Republicans have offered -- and continue to offer -- in this debate. Death panels. Socialism. Hitler. Government takeover. Socialized medicine. Incomprehensible charts. Incessant whining about the number of pages in a proposal. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">… [R]egardless what side of the dispute you're on, it's worth appreciating the vibrancy, energy, and seriousness with which progressives are engaging in the debate, as compared to the incoherent, ridiculous, and dull qualities our friends on the right have brought to the table.</span> </p></blockquote><br />Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have come to define the acceptable terms of the debate among Republicans. (Even Mitt Romney has disowned his own successful reforms in Massachusetts – just as he had earlier disavowed his support for reproductive freedom and gay rights.)<br /><br />Recall last spring … and summer … and fall, when the Senate finance committee chairman Max Baucus held up the legislation for months trying to craft a bipartisan compromise that would attract Republican votes. That outreach didn’t prevent so-called Republican moderates like Charles Grassley from going out on the stump during the summer’s Teabagger protests and repeating lies that he knew perfectly well to be untrue. As I </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/09/lies-and-lying-liars-who-tell-them.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote in September</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">This lie about health reform extending subsidized coverage to illegal immigrants is official Republican party-line doctrine, being repeated even by supposed "moderates” like Chuck Grassley, who is part of the “Gang of Six” on the Senate Finance Committee that has kept legislation bottled up for months. </span><a href="http://mediamattersaction.org/factcheck/200908130004"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Grassley said</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, “The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund health care subsidies for illegal immigrants.” (The “moderate” Grassley also piled on to the “Obama is going to kill granny” lie, saying, “<em><strong>You have every right to fear</strong></em>. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. You should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” But … Grassley </span><a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/08/13/oh-those-death-panels/"><span style="font-family:georgia;">previously voted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"> to extend Medicare funding to “counseling … with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and … advanced care planning.” In other words, Grassley was “for Death Panels before he was against them.”)</span><br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />Despite abandoning the public option, the employer mandate and just about anything else that might offend a Republican, Baucus was able to attract only a single Republican vote in committee – that of Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. But despite the fact that the bill did not change in any respect of concern to Snowe as it proceeded to the full Senate, she subsequently voted against the final bill. She was able to offer no substantive policy reason for her change of heart, saying only that the bill was being “</span><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/snowe-says-no-to-health-reform.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">rushed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” – despite the fact that it had been held up for months to secure the changes she demanded. The pressure from her party to toe the obstructionist line was just too much for her to resist.<br /><br />The debate in the Senate was the second longest debate in that body’s history. Republicans even filibustered the filibuster vote, forcing the 92-year old wheelchair-bound Senator Byrd to vote at one in the morning … not once but twice. It was the first time in over 110 years that the Senate voted on Christmas Eve. At the end of all that, the bill that started as a centrist Republican plan did not garner a single Republican vote. This is a bill that managed the unprecedented feat of securing the endorsements of both </span><a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/73249-ama-endorses-senate-health-bill"><span style="font-family:arial;">the AMA</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (historically opposed to all health care reform) and </span><a href="http://aarp.org/aarp/presscenter/pressrelease/articles/aarp_thanks_senateforpassinghealthcarereform.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">the AARP</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (representing all those “grannies” that President Obama is allegedly intent upon finishing off) – hardly a radical coalition. But not a single Republican.<br /><br />If I could recommend only one article on the health care bill as it stands now it would be “</span><a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/just-noise"><span style="font-family:arial;">And The Rest Is Just Noise</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” by Jonathan Chait in <em>The New Republic</em>. There is too much to excerpt, especially in its description of the best features of the bill and its refutation of some of the most common attacks on it, so just READ IT. But especially for disappointed progressives, I would note these parts:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">American liberals have a habit of withdrawing into cynicism and ennui at the most inopportune moments. The 2000 presidential election, and subsequent recount, was one such moment. The most die-hard reaches of the left, deeming the Democratic Party hopelessly corrupt, rallied to Ralph Nader’s fulsome populist denunciation of Al Gore’s subservience to the corporate agenda. …<br /><br />At some level, it is possible to understand the roots of liberal frustration. The<br />machinery of Congress has ground away at the health care bill, as it does to almost any bill. … What has emerged from that machinery is not merely “better than nothing” or “a good start.” It is the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades. …<br /><br />…If we want to understand why a bill that embodies the best of moderate Republican ideas has attracted zero support from the Republican Party, it is because moderation has disappeared from the party. The takeover of ideological conservatives, implacably opposed to the expansion of government, has rendered impossible any bipartisan solution.<br /><br />But what about the left? Why has the rhetoric from progressives increasingly come to mirror the uninformed ranting of the right? … The defeat of the public plan, largely at the behest of insurance companies that don’t want competition, does weaken the reform plan. Yet liberals have responded out of all proportion to the scale of the setback. Left-of-center economists and policy wonks—including Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, who created the public option—have endorsed the Senate bill. …<br /><br />…The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era. The GOP retreat into Palinism represents one half of this collapse. The left’s revolt against health care reform represents the other. What has re-emerged in recent weeks is the spirit of the New Left--distrustful of evolutionary change, compromise between business and<br />labor, and the practical tools of progressive reform. It is the spirit that rejected Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000.<br /><br />The New Left rejection of “corporate liberalism” came at what we now regard as the historical apex of American liberalism. At the moment of another historical triumph,<br />liberals are retreating from politics into languor, rage, and other incarnations of anti-politics. One day they may look back upon this time with longing.<br /></span></blockquote><br />For disappointed progressives, I also recommend these two pieces: </span><a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/12/20/rich-poor/#more-19697"><span style="font-family:arial;">Rich Poor</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> by TIME’s Joe Klein; and this excellent blog post (“</span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/simulating-single-payer/#more-6219"><span style="font-family:arial;">Simulating Single Payer</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) by Paul Krugman explaining the economics of the individual mandate. For Democrats or Republicans, I recommend this response to a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> editorial by OMB director Peter Orzag (“</span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/12/14/No-Illusions/"><span style="font-family:arial;">No Illusions</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”)<br /><br />Meanwhile, count me among those progressives who whole-heartedly support the current health care plan.<br /><br />Only three years ago Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress and Bush/Cheney were running the executive branch. If you had described this legislation then and the progress it has made through Congress, I think progressives would have been overwhelmed with delight. The filibuster, which used to be reserved for extraordinary things like denying civil rights to black people, now has to be overcome to enact <em><strong>any</strong></em> business in the Senate. You combine that with 40 Republicans (Snowe has now apparently fallen in line with the rest of her caucus in their blind obstructionism) who will vote against <em><strong>any</strong></em> Democratic initiative no matter what, and President Obama and Leader Reid have to hold together 100% of their caucus. (And that is giving Lieberman credit for being a Democrat.) Given the egos and independence of Senators that is extraordinarily tough to achieve – even if Democrats didn’t have an ideologically diverse caucus (in any other era, Ben Nelson would be considered a conservative Republican). I don’t understand where progressives who are complaining about the loss of the public option think they would have gotten their 59th or 60th votes – or will get them if this version of reform dies. Do any of them really in their hearts believe that Lieberman would have voted against all the insurance interests in Hartford to which he is beholden? It was <em><strong>never</strong></em> going to happen no matter how much the Democratic leadership threatened him. It wouldn’t take much for him to pull a Jeffords or Specter and bolt to the other side – in which case we would lose him on even fairly routine votes. As much as I dislike Lieberman, he still votes with the majority 85% to 90% of the time, which is a lot better than Snowe. In other words, the WORST member of the Democratic caucus is still much better than the BEST member of the Republican caucus.<br /><br />In that light, the fact that President Obama and Leader Reid have managed to corral 100% of their caucus behind the most progressive piece of major legislation in a generation is extraordinary. Bear in mind, the public option was not even a topic of debate during the election. It arose as the cause célèbre of progressives only <em><strong>after</strong></em> the election. This bill is almost everything that President Obama and Hillary Clinton advocated during the primaries. And to achieve it in an environment requiring 100% support of a 60 vote caucus <em><strong>that Democrats didn’t even have a year ago</strong></em> (and only obtained when Specter was driven out of the Republican Party) is extraordinarily impressive.<br /><br />At the end of the day, Democrats still needed the votes of Lieberman and Nelson. While it is always possible to fault tactical decisions along the way, I don’t think the result would have been better. (I think ultimately Baucus did more harm than Lieberman or Nelson by keeping legislation bottled up for months over the summer while the opposition mobilized and drove the poll numbers for reform down.) In fact, had Republicans actually participated constructively in the process I think Democrats would have given major concessions (as they did with the stimulus bill) in order to bring in even a few Republicans, resulting in a much weaker bill. As it turns out, Republican obstructionism probably helped unite the Democratic caucus and resulted in a stronger bill than anyone would have expected even a year ago.<br /><br />I’m hopeful that the Senate bill will be improved modestly in conference and will eventually be signed into law. That will be a remarkable achievement. But this process has revealed serious dysfunction in our political process. It is not realistic to expect 100% support of a 60-member caucus to address any of our country’s problems. And if that 60-vote super-majority is lost in the next election, the result is likely to be political paralysis. The Senate is already undemocratic enough by its very nature. Ultimately, it must be possible for a majority in the Senate to govern and be held accountable for the results. It would be nice if we actually had two political parties serious about governance. But for the time being that just isn’t the case. So in the meantime, let the majority govern.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-68696296002831918122009-12-22T14:54:00.000-08:002009-12-22T15:40:08.560-08:00health care costs<span style="font-family:arial;">As we seem to be approaching the end game for the current effort at health care reform in Congress, it is worth reviewing what the debate is all about. As I outlined in a blog post back in August (“</span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/08/common-ground-on-health-care.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">common ground on health care</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) the basic objectives of reform are two-fold: 1/ expand coverage to more of the 45 million or so Americans who currently lack health care coverage and 2/ control costs in the system (if you can call our current mess a “system”). I quoted Paul Krugman’s good short summary of the basic elements of the approach being taken in Congress (“</span><a title="Permanent Link to Health reform made simple" href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/health-reform-made-simple/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Health reform made simple</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”):<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can’t cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Everything else is about making that core work. Individual mandates are a way to prevent gaming of the system by people who don’t sign up until they’re sick; employer mandates a way to hold down the on-budget costs by preventing a rush by employers to drop insurance; the public option a way to create effective competition and hold costs down further. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">But what it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.<br /><br />That’s it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn’t understand it is basically saying that he doesn’t want to understand it. </p></span></blockquote></span>Now that it appears that the public option is out, the focus as we move into conference between the House and Senate will be on other measures in the bill, particularly those that might help control costs. For those following this debate, I thought I would provide links to some of the better pieces on medical cost control that I’ve read over the past few months. If you read these I think you will have a pretty good sense of some of the problems and some possible solutions. They are non-partisan and non-ideological.<br /><br />I would start with the excellent piece by </span><a href="http://www.gawande.com/bio.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">Atul Gawande</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in <em>The New Yorker</em> (“</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande"><span style="font-family:arial;">The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”). It has received a great deal of attention, in part because President Obama insisted early in this health care reform process that all the members of his administration working on these issues read it. It looks at health care delivery in McAllen, Texas which is second only to Miami in having the highest health care costs in the country, with Medicare spending per enrollee almost twice the national average. Its abnormal costs cannot be explained by demographics or the habits of its inhabitants. Rather the article attributes its soaring costs to the mercenary culture that has developed in the health care delivery system in McAllen. The author contrasts that with the Mayo Clinic which has evolved one of the highest-quality, lowest-cost health care systems in the country.<br /><br />Another good piece on medical costs is <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care">How American Health Care Killed My Father</a> by David Goldhill in <em>The Atlantic</em>. The story starts with his personal experience with the system (referring to a different New Yorker piece than the one I cite above):<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">…My dad became a statistic—merely one of the </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/washington/19hospital.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">roughly 100,000 Americans</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">About a week after my father’s death, <em>The New Yorker</em> ran an </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande"><span style="font-family:georgia;">article by Atul Gawande</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people. </p></span></blockquote></span>He goes on the recount his own investigations into the problems with our health care system:<br /></span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />Goldhill does a good job describing the intractability of cost control in our current fee-for-service system which encourages treatment rather than results and where consumers directly see few of the costs they incur because of employer and government provided insurance.<br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">That is probably a good segue into the excellent short piece by David Leonhardt (one of the <em>New York Times’</em> best business writers) briefly summarizing some of what we know about efforts to control medical malpractice liability costs (if this is a subject that really interests you, Leonhardt’s links are useful):<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Here, then, is the brief version of the facts: </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion,<br />economists say. But that doesn’t mean the malpractice system is working. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The fear of lawsuits among doctors does seem to lead to a noticeable amount of wasteful treatment. </span><a title="Professor Chandra’s biography." href="http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/amitabh-chandra"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Amitabh Chandra</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> — a Harvard economist whose research is cited by </span><a title="The A.M.A.’s case for reform (PDF)." href="http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/-1/mlrnow.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">both</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> the </span><a title="More articles about American Medical Association" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/american_medical_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><span style="font-family:georgia;">American Medical Association</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> </span><a title="The trial lawyers’ argument." href="http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/xchg/justice/hs.xsl/8681.htm"><span style="font-family:georgia;">and</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> the trial lawyers’ association —<br />says $60 billion a year, or about 3 percent of overall medical spending, is a<br />reasonable upper-end estimate. If a new policy could eliminate close to that much waste without causing other problems, it would be a no-brainer. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">At the same time, though, the current system appears to treat actual malpractice too lightly. Trials may get a lot of attention, but they are the exception. Far more common are errors that never lead to any action. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">After reviewing thousands of patient records, medical researchers </span><a title="A study of costs in Utah and Colorado." href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10570659"><span style="font-family:georgia;">have</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> </span><a title="A study of malpractice claims." href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2057025"><span style="font-family:georgia;">estimated</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"> that only 2 to 3 percent of cases of medical negligence lead to a malpractice claim. For<br />every notorious error … there are dozens more. You never hear about these other<br />cases. </span></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">So we have a malpractice system that, while not as bad as some critics suggest, is expensive in all the wrong ways. </p></span></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">The malpractice problem is as not as straightforward as the polarized views on the subject might suggest. For example, liability caps don’t seem to have as much effect as their advocates claim and hurt those most deserving of compensation. But it malpractice reform is an important part of the problem from the standpoint of providers and needs to be addressed. (And $60 billion a year is still a lot of money.) I’m certainly not an expert on this subject, and don’t want to make this a post about malpractice reform. But there are a few approaches I think might be worth pursuing. The first is a more general problem with tort liability in this country. I would go to the “British Rule” where the prevailing party gets attorneys fees. That tends to discourage frivolous lawsuits while encouraging those with strong merit. In malpractice cases I think we might take advantage of </span><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106828530"><span style="font-family:arial;">comparative effectiveness research</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (which would be encouraged by the legislation working its way through Congress) to create some “safe harbors” for providers who conform to “best practices.” It might also be helpful to have some experts who are appointed by the court rather than the parties to cut down on some of the sham “science” in those cases. More fundamentally, we might consider instituting some form of “no fault” compensation for those injured by medical errors as an alternative to litigation (which might also encourage more transparency with regard to those errors and their causes).<br /><br />Getting back to Congressional legislation, and again to Atul Gawande, he makes a good case in yet another <em>New Yorker</em> piece (“</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/14/091214fa_fact_gawande"><span style="font-family:arial;">Testing, Testing: The health-care bill has no master plan for controlling costs. Is that a bad thing?</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”), that the Senate bill is a good start on cost control. Gawande uses the history of government efforts to improve agricultural efficiency as a model for improving health care delivery.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen. Problems of the second kind, by contrast, are never solved, exactly; they are managed. Reforming the agricultural system so that it serves the country’s needs has been a process, involving millions of farmers pursuing their individual interests. This could not happen by fiat. There was no one-time fix. The same goes for reforming the health-care system so that it serves the country’s needs. No nation has escaped the cost problem: the expenditure curves have outpaced inflation around the world. Nobody has found a master switch that you can flip to make the problem go away. If we want to start solving it, we first need to recognize that there is no technical solution. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly. Our information systems are primitive. The malpractice system is wasteful and counterproductive.<br />And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas.<br />It’s just that nobody knows for sure. … </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf through it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. Medicare and Medicaid currently pay clinicians the same amount regardless of results. But there is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There’s a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There’s a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by health-care workers. Still another would test a system of penalties and rewards scaled to the quality of home health and rehabilitation care. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Other experiments try moving medicine away from fee-for-service payment altogether. A bundled-payment provision would pay medical teams just one thirty-day fee for all the outpatient and inpatient services related to, say, an operation. This would give clinicians an incentive to work together to smooth care and reduce complications. One pilot would go even further, encouraging clinicians to band together into “Accountable Care Organizations” that take responsibility for all their patients’ needs, including prevention—so that fewer patients need operations in the first place. These groups would be permitted to keep part of the savings they generate, as long as they meet quality and service thresholds. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">The bill has ideas for changes in other parts of the system, too. Some provisions attempt to improve efficiency through administrative reforms, by, for example, requiring insurance companies to create a single standardized form for insurance reimbursement, to alleviate the clerical burden on clinicians. There are tests of various kinds of community wellness programs. The legislation also continues a stimulus-package program that funds comparative-effectiveness research—testing existing treatments for a condition against one another—because fewer treatment failures should mean lower costs. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">There are hundreds of pages of these programs, almost all of which appear in the House bill as well. But the Senate reform package goes a few U.S.D.A.-like steps further. It creates a center to generate innovations in paying for and organizing care. It creates an independent Medicare advisory commission, which would sort through all the pilot results and make recommendations that would automatically take effect unless Congress blocks them. It also takes a decisive step in changing how insurance companies deal with the costs of health care. In the nineteen-eighties, H.M.O.s tried to control costs by directly overruling doctors’ recommendations (through requiring pre-authorization and denying payment); the backlash taught them that it was far easier to avoid sicker patients and pass along cost increases to employers. Both the House and the Senate bills prevent insurance companies from excluding patients. But the Senate plan also imposes an excise tax on the most expensive, “Cadillac” insurance plans. This pushes private insurers to make the same efforts that public<br />insurers will make to test incentives and programs that encourage clinicians to keep costs down. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Which of these programs will work? We can’t know. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t credit any of them with substantial savings. … But there can’t be a master plan. That’s a crucial lesson of our agricultural experience. And there’s another: with problems that don’t have technical solutions, the struggle never ends. </p></span></blockquote></span>I think this is an important piece and strongly recommend it.<br /><br />Finally, for those of you distressed at the apparent loss of the public option, Timothy Noah makes the case in <em>Slate</em> (“</span><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2235916/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Mr. Level Playing Field</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”) that the public option, at least the watered-down “level-playing-field” option limited to individuals participating in the insurance exchanges, wouldn’t have had much of an effect on cost control after all. Actually, I’m not sure I entirely buy that. I have not lost all </span><span style="font-family:arial;">faith in the markets and they may be telling us that the insurance companies dodged a bullet. Since everyone’s favorite senator, Joe Lieberman, said on October 27th that he would filibuster a health reform bill if it included a public option of any kind, look what has happened to the </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/21/seeing-public-subsidy-not_n_399733.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">shares of health insurance companies</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (through last Friday’s market close):<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNxt_rI4r6ysf-omNFN5gb-SfdE3N89kxiU2WSLV4GSWwZWZkPG9TR8T6Vk3zgXPKB1zneiFEKCSYcDzgIcIMMClyumsJOZzpCN07e7UarAOkxZj-aObO0YpVMdWqFZ7QanKqzX4fcDTc/s1600-h/health+insurance+share+prices.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418198094752484578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 155px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNxt_rI4r6ysf-omNFN5gb-SfdE3N89kxiU2WSLV4GSWwZWZkPG9TR8T6Vk3zgXPKB1zneiFEKCSYcDzgIcIMMClyumsJOZzpCN07e7UarAOkxZj-aObO0YpVMdWqFZ7QanKqzX4fcDTc/s400/health+insurance+share+prices.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"> [click to enlarge]<br /></span><br />By comparison, the Dow was up only 2.3% during that time and the NASDAQ only 1.4%. That suggests that the markets believe the public option would have had a non-trivial impact on the profitability of the health insurance companies. There is an alternative explanation, however: With the resolution of the public option issue (regardless of which way it was resolved), the path was cleared for adoption of health care reform legislation which will deliver millions of additional customers to the insurance companies. Even if a public option had been included, the shares of the insurance companies might have gone up with the prospect of passage enhanced. I suspect the truth is a combination of the two: The insurance companies would benefit from the legislation even if the public option was included but without it they will benefit more.<br /><br />Overall, I think the iconic status of the public option among progressives probably exaggerates its actual importance. I certainly understand the reluctance to hand more money over to the insurance companies. As someone who purchases insurance in the individual market, I would have been very receptive to a public option. But according to the Congressional Budget Office (not necessarily definitive but nonetheless informative) the public option would have saved the federal government only $25 billion over 10 years. That’s a lot of money, but only a drop in the bucket when compared with US health care spending of $2.5 trillion this year alone. And according to the CBO it would have had virtually no effect on the number of people buying insurance through the government-run insurance exchanges. So if progressives were strong supporters of this legislation when it included the public option, they should still be strong supporters today.<br /><br />We can still hope that some stronger cost control measures come out of the conference committee. The three ways in which I would particularly like to see the Senate bill strengthened would be to: 1/ have the mandatory insurance payout ratio raised up from the 80% in the Senate bill (less than the industry’s current average 81% payout ratio) to the 85% in the House bill or even higher (90% sounds good), 2/ give Medicare the ability to negotiate the price of drugs (how absurd is it that the federal government, as a large buyer of a product, is prohibited by law from negotiating the price?) or at the very least to allow consumers to import drugs from other approved countries (where governments <em><strong>do</strong></em> have the ability to negotiate lower prices – ultimately a poor substitute for getting it right in<em><strong> this</strong></em> country) and, 3/ eliminate the current antitrust immunity for the insurance industry (which is already in the House bill but not the Senate bill). (This may not be related to cost control, but I also hope the conference finds ways to accelerate implementation of some of the key elements of the legislation like establishment of the insurance exchanges which now is pushed off until 2013 – after not only the 2010 election cycle but also the 2012 election cycle.)<br /><br />These articles are not definitive but they are a good introduction to the issues involved with health care cost control. If we don’t control the growth of health care costs it is going to bankrupt not only the federal and state governments but American businesses and consumers. Now that the public option appears to be dead there is really no excuse for Republican obstructionism in Congress. Even if some members of Congress might have preferred a different approach, the basic structure of the legislation would have been fairly non-controversial in the absence of that lock-step Republican partisanship. The legislation pretty much follows the model signed into law in Massachusetts by then-governor Mitt Romney – hardly some kind of radical socialist. Any member of Congress who isn’t serious about controlling health care costs is not serious about governance (and certainly not serious about the long-term federal budget deficit). Unfortunately that is probably a good summary of today’s Republican Party.<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-53954171285960452162009-11-30T23:21:00.001-08:002009-12-01T09:35:01.558-08:00dithering<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRUsdYZOVvnPMUC-3tX2ntXXwBTHa0J0yhRP5Wbpb8-dT58ttaSNmomYNdVv9Uw5IMTHKYCRydJEk2q7KgUxP0erGG9j1_xbSQ80pt_SvzVBeJKCsHNSqvvEPneJig7MwTqOxjLP1qwws/s1600/tom+tomorrow+when+history+began.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5410165203653476178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 367px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRUsdYZOVvnPMUC-3tX2ntXXwBTHa0J0yhRP5Wbpb8-dT58ttaSNmomYNdVv9Uw5IMTHKYCRydJEk2q7KgUxP0erGG9j1_xbSQ80pt_SvzVBeJKCsHNSqvvEPneJig7MwTqOxjLP1qwws/s400/tom+tomorrow+when+history+began.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">[another excellent </span><a href="http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/11/09/tomo/index.html"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">Tom Tomorrow</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:78%;"> cartoon]<br /></span><br />Last month, the Vice President from those missing years, Dick Cheney, interjected himself into President Obama’s deliberations over Afghanistan, accusing him of “dithering.” Emerging from his undisclosed lair, the Dark One </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33426929/ns/politics-white_house/"><span style="font-family:arial;">sneered</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger."<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />(He went on to attack President Obama for scrutiny of the Dark One’s torture practices.)<br /><br />The usual practice in presidential transitions is that the outgoing administration gets out of town immediately after the inauguration and allows the new administration to enact its own policies without gratuitous hectoring from the previous regime. Cheney, who was uncommunicative to an extraordinary degree while in office (going so far as to appeal to the Supreme Court to avoid having to reveal the names of the industry task force he put together to determine energy policy), all of a sudden can’t keep his mouth shut now that someone else has to deal with the catastrophe his team left behind.<br /><br />Let’s review: The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, trillion dollar deficits, and two wars going badly.<br /><br />The proper response would have been to slither back under a rock somewhere. But if Cheney were to insist upon saying something the proper response would have been along the lines of: “I’m sorry. Really. I’m very, very sorry for the state of the country. If there is anything – ANYTHING – I can do to help, please let me know. Not that there is any reason you SHOULD seek my assistance. But if you do, I will just be here under this rock.”<br /><br />As an example of how it should be done: Vice president Gore – part of the team that produced unprecedented economic growth including the creation of over 22 million jobs in eight years, that left behind record budget surpluses, reduced federal civilian employment by over 400,000, led a NATO force that deposed a brutal dictator in Serbia without the loss of a single American life, and … (well, you get the idea) – gracefully left DC and stayed quiet for a respectable period of time despite having garnered over 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election. And, it is worth pointing out, neither Gore nor Clinton nor any other member of their administration made any attempt to turn the Bush administration’s massive intelligence failure resulting in the 9/11 attacks into a partisan issue. (You might recall from distant history that in May of 2001, Bush named a terrorism task force headed by none other than Dick Cheney. According to the 9-11 Commission, the </span><a href="http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=fs-108-2-99"><span style="font-family:arial;">Cheney Task Force</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, “was just getting underway when the 9/11 attack occurred.” Which is another way of saying that they never met. They were “dithering,” as some might say.)<br /><br />[Rather than following the example of Cheney between Bush administrations, retiring to a CEO gig at a company at the center of the military/industrial complex – like, say, Haliburton – Gore headed to Silicon Valley and joined the Google team long before their IPO and joined the Apple board when its share price was $7.47 – it closed today a few cents under $200. That is the kind of mojo that produced record budget surpluses.]<br /><br />The war in Afghanistan (at least the latest iteration of the war that has been going on for over 30 years), which began over eight years ago (98 months), is now the third longest war in US history after Vietnam (116 months) and the Revolutionary War (100 months). And in both of those other wars the insurgents won – not a good omen. World War II, by contrast, only took 45 months. But, wait. I thought we WON the war in Afghanistan back in … 2002? I know because in September of 2002, George W. Bush </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/15/bush-taliban-eliminated/"><span style="font-family:arial;">assured us</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that, “The Taliban’s ability to brutalize the Afghan people and to harbor and support terrorists has been virtually eliminated.” He took it even further in September of 2004, </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/15/bush-taliban-eliminated/"><span style="font-family:arial;">boasting</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that the “Taliban no longer is in existence”. No longer in existence. Pretty definitive. No wonder, then, that when Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/22/cheney-afghanistan-speech/"><span style="font-family:arial;">asked for another 30,000 troops</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, the Bush administration denied them. They chose to … dither. For eight years. While pursuing a trillion dollar war of choice in Iraq.<br /><br />The Senate Foreign Relations Committee </span><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091129/ts_alt_afp/usattacksafghanistanbinladen"><span style="font-family:arial;">released a report today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that said what we already knew: Osama bin Laden was "within the grasp" of US forces in Afghanistan in late 2001 but escaped because the military’s call for reinforcements was denied by the Bush administration:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan."<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />Not that Cheney needs anything of real substance to launch a partisan attack on President Obama. He even took it upon himself to </span><a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/cheney-obama-bow-very-upsetting-and-fundamentally-harmful.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">attack President Obama</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for showing too much deference to the Emperor of Japan, calling the president’s bow to the 75-year old man, “a sign of weakness” and “fundamentally harmful” to the US. Does that mean Japan now goes on Cheney’s list of further wars after Iran? Because everyone knows that the proper response of a US president to a Japanese leader is to </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush_vomiting_incident"><span style="font-family:arial;">throw up on him</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />(Joe Klein had a good comment in </span><a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1942832,00.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">TIME</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: “Was his deep bow indicative of anything other than his physical fitness? (My midsection, sadly, prevents the appearance of obsequiousness in such circumstances.)”)<br /><br />Contrast President Obama’s diplomatic gesture with the sobriety and dignity Cheney showed when </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43247-2005Jan27.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">seated among heads of state and other dignitaries</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, including French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakcDmhgO538XW542A8qTcPJYCQDcmn6_G8ujUr_w1Cuf5CoyD4JsXb6wnlEvnCo32d3fqjtp2Rfs8G-QeXgaevt6NxEGcS1rtgmjshTqm2AKTUEned0_fwWGxzPAqCUMu10srosNAV58/s1600/cheney+photo.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5410165527136559266" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 282px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakcDmhgO538XW542A8qTcPJYCQDcmn6_G8ujUr_w1Cuf5CoyD4JsXb6wnlEvnCo32d3fqjtp2Rfs8G-QeXgaevt6NxEGcS1rtgmjshTqm2AKTUEned0_fwWGxzPAqCUMu10srosNAV58/s400/cheney+photo.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />So now President Obama is left to deal with the tragic mess in Afghanistan – on top of the worst economy in 70 years and that other war that Cheney was so eager to start. There are no good options in Afghanistan. For better or worse (worse, I fear), President Obama has already more than doubled the number of US troops in that country. He is to be commended for taking his time to challenge the options he was being given and to determine a strategy going forward before further escalating the US commitment in that country. I don’t like what I have been reading about what he will be announcing tomorrow evening. I would prefer we get out as soon as practical (more on that in due course). I REALLY don’t like the idea of further escalation in that graveyard of empires. But I will hear out President Obama with an open mind tomorrow evening knowing that he has been struggling with the difficult hand he has been dealt and that he has given genuine thought to the challenges we face there.<br /><br />Rather than just cringe before the macho swagger of Republican critics like Dick Cheney who don’t have the basic decency to support their successors who are left to struggle with the unprecedented combination of catastrophes they left behind.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-40574969491738488752009-11-25T15:33:00.000-08:002009-11-29T11:46:22.903-08:00deficits vs. unemployment<span style="font-family:arial;">Let’s take a little test here to see if you have what it takes to be a political pundit. Look at the following two charts, each of which puts a recent economic metric into historical perspective, and tell me which one appears to indicate an alarming crisis.<br /><br />The first chart is the </span><a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS30"><span style="font-family:arial;">yield on the 30-year Treasury bond</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp-jD-jI7tAOJQXkXyjguc1NwBNWcRYB7H91pgpneuydLtLTa8bJMn749eaz1kwA5IqHlA3Z29SLUraHhpMjqigfvvo_2vGEoxNPLWZ09Y2oewoAMgYNpKUisgz2xzIEmawxeYMxcwugY/s1600/30+year+treasury.bmp"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408189826096759234" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp-jD-jI7tAOJQXkXyjguc1NwBNWcRYB7H91pgpneuydLtLTa8bJMn749eaz1kwA5IqHlA3Z29SLUraHhpMjqigfvvo_2vGEoxNPLWZ09Y2oewoAMgYNpKUisgz2xzIEmawxeYMxcwugY/s400/30+year+treasury.bmp" /></a><br />[Note: The 30-year Treasury bond was discontinued for 4½ years – from 10/01 to 2/06 – due to the record budget surpluses bequeathed by the Clinton administration and the Bush administration’s subsequent desire to avoid dealing with the long-term consequences of its return to record budget deficits. Here is the corresponding chart for the </span><a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS10"><span style="font-family:arial;">yield on the 10-year Treasury</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.]<br /><br />As you can see from this chart, the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond dropped steadily from the early/mid-‘80’s until the early part of this decade and has held pretty steady since (with the exception of a big dip during last year’s financial crisis as money sought a safe haven in Treasuries). As I write this, the yield is </span><a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETYX"><span style="font-family:arial;">4.24%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (</span><a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5ETNX"><span style="font-family:arial;">3.28%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for the 10-year Treasury), close to the lowest it has been in 50 years with the exception of that dip last year. (By contrast, it was </span><a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS30/downloaddata?cid=115"><span style="font-family:arial;">8.9%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> when Ronald Reagan left office.) Basically, the US government is enjoying just about the easiest time it has had financing its debt in generations.<br /><br />Now for the </span><a href="http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/11/employment-report-190k-jobs-lost-102.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">second chart</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: The rate of job loss during the current Great Recession compared with the rate of loss in all previous post-WWII recessions:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdIkw1xRIQusngRduNo-Nl5kCnEYjOGX0k9l0CKs2tiw-U9v-HDQbv2o6nk8tv-KAYughg-lD4raO7kpZ5ZQDmiGezDYQO2pVIAZw7erlsytoCjPIdV3A0XRmAJD_ez2yKu0RThYOg-k/s1600/unemployment.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 260px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408190480693337378" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdIkw1xRIQusngRduNo-Nl5kCnEYjOGX0k9l0CKs2tiw-U9v-HDQbv2o6nk8tv-KAYughg-lD4raO7kpZ5ZQDmiGezDYQO2pVIAZw7erlsytoCjPIdV3A0XRmAJD_ez2yKu0RThYOg-k/s400/unemployment.jpg" /></a><br />The unemployment rate, at 10.2%, is the highest it has been since the Great Depression. By the broader measure that includes the underemployed and those who have dropped out of the labor force, it is 17.5%. And we continue to shed jobs. (Check out this </span><a href="http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">fascinating time-lapse map</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> showing the increase in unemployment by county by month since the Great Recession began two years ago.)<br /><br />There you have it, aspiring pundits. Can you guess which is the alarming crisis: a/ the ability of the US government to finance its debt, or, b/ unemployment?<br /><br />If you guessed, “a/ the ability of the US government to finance its debt,” congratulations! You, too, could be a political pundit for the <em>New York Times</em>, <em>Wall Street Journal</em> or any number of other publications or networks.<br /><br />You would expect an </span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704888404574547492725871998.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">op-ed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> from the chief economist for John McCain’s presidential campaign, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, to hype the deficit threat. But earlier this week, the <em>New York Times</em> published a front-page piece by Ed Andrews (probably that paper’s worst business writer), on the subject (“</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/23rates.html?_r=1&hp"><span style="font-family:arial;">Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”). It quotes legendary Pimco bond fund manager, Bill Gross, but fails to note that Gross has increased his fund’s holdings of US government-related debt </span><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aN78quNzqd5Y&pos=5"><span style="font-family:arial;">from 48% last September to 63% now</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> – the highest portion he has held in US government debt in five years and not exactly the position the world’s greatest bond fund manager would be taking if he expected interest rates on that debt to explode (which would cause the value of his holdings to plummet).<br /><br />Currently, the US government’s net interest expense as a percentage of GDP is the lowest it has been in 30 years. But Andrews notes that it is projected to increase dramatically over the next ten years – to roughly the level it was when Bill Clinton took office in 1992. That’s certainly undesirable. But as front-page crises go, it doesn’t compare to the <em><strong>immediate</strong></em> problem of unemployment.<br /><br />And it doesn’t remotely suggest anything like the looming prospect of a US government default on its obligations or a return to hyper-inflation as some of the more alarmist commentary suggests could happen. Take, for instance, a recent op-ed by Robert Samuelson in the <em>Washington Post</em> (“</span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110101704.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Could America Go Broke?</span></a> <span style="font-family:arial;">”), which included bits like this: </span><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“Deprived of international or domestic credit, defaulting countries in the past have suffered deep economic downturns, hyperinflation, or both. The odds may be against a wealthy society tempting that fate, but even the remote possibility underlines the precariousness and the novelty of the present situation. The arguments over whether we need more ’stimulus’ (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments’ economic maneuvering room.”<br /></span></blockquote><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Samuelson cites Japan as an example of government debt out of control, which actually disproves his alarmist rhetoric – Japan’s government debt has increased to over 200% of its GDP (about three times the US level) while the interest rate on its 10 year bonds has actually decreased from over 7% in 1990 to 2.1% now.<br /><br />Let’s compare the prospect of continuing high unemployment with the risk of a big increase in inflation. Paul Krugman points to the </span><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/a-bizarre-complacency/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Philadelphia Fed survey</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of professional economic forecasters. Inflation is forecast to remain comfortably below the Fed’s 2% target while unemployment persists at stubbornly high rates – over 8% well into 2012. The current spread between 10-year Treasuries and the 10-year TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) indicate that the market is forecasting 10-year inflation averaging 1.5%.<br /><br />That's why it is troubling to read </span><a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBr0LFXMFF1HE6-n_ZTN1829QS1QD9BUTPVG0"><span style="font-family:arial;">reports</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> like this:<br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The Obama administration, mindful of public anxiety over the government's mushrooming debt, is shifting emphasis from big-spending policies to deficit reduction. Domestic agencies have been told to brace for a spending freeze or cuts of up to 5 percent as part of a midterm election-year push to rein in record budget shortfalls.<br /></span></blockquote></span>With unemployment still rising and nascent economic growth anemic, premature focus on near-term deficit reduction risks a repetition of FDR’s spending cuts and tax increases in 1937 that plunged the economy back into a steep decline before the country had fully recovered from the Great Depression.<br /><br />While unemployment should be the priority in the short term, deficit reduction should be a long-term priority. Toward that end, it is worth revisiting how we got into our current mess and what that suggests for how we get out of it.<br /><br />As I have pointed out before, the real explosion in the federal debt began under Ronald Reagan who cut taxes while increasing government spending to levels previously exceeded only during the four years of World War II. (After six years with spending over 22% of GDP and two years over 23%, Reagan left office with federal spending running at over 21%. By contrast, President Clinton left office with spending at 18.5% of GDP.) The result was that the national debt increased more than 400% from less than a trillion when Reagan took office to over $4 trillion when President Clinton and a Democratic Congress finally increased taxes again in 1993. The deficits during those years are even more dramatic when you state them in current dollars. In 2009 dollars (using the </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">OMB year-end debt figures</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and the </span><a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/GDPDEF.txt"><span style="font-family:arial;">St. Louis Fed GDP deflator</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), Reagan and the first Bush ran up cumulative deficits of roughly $5 trillion. (This despite favorable demographics that resulted in entitlement spending to decline temporarily from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. Last year, by contrast, the figure was 12.5%.)<br /><br />The turning point in this deficit story was the 1993 Budget Act, about which I have </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/02/1993-budget-act.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">written before</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, which was designed to eliminate the record budget deficits inherited by President Clinton. It included a large overall increase in taxes and extended the pay-as-you-go budget rules. It passed without a single Republican vote in Congress by the closest possible margin – by one vote in the House and with Vice President Gore breaking a 50-50 tie in the Senate. Republicans predicted that the economy would collapse as a result. Instead, it produced record budget surpluses and the strongest economy in a generation. But the Democrats paid a price, as they were crushed in the 1994 elections and lost control of Congress. Unfortunately, the lesson that was learned in Congress was that fiscal responsibility doesn’t pay politically.<br /><br />George W. Bush inherited record budget surpluses but quickly turned that around. Together with a Republican Congress, he enacted over $2 trillion in tax cuts, increased the military budget even before counting the trillion dollar cost of two wars, and passed the largest increase in entitlement spending (Medicare Part D) since the creation of Medicare in the 1960’s with a ten-year cost of almost a trillion dollars. At least when LBJ created Medicare he also enacted taxes to pay for it. Bush and Congressional Republicans never even discussed any means of paying for their budget-busting initiatives. To pull that off, they had to let the pay-as-you-go budget rules lapse. That left them free to increase spending and cut taxes at will – which they did. The result, predictably, was an increase of over $5 trillion in the federal debt, almost doubling it in just eight years. Together with the quadrupling of debt under Reagan and Bush’s father, that accounted for almost 80% of all debt that had been accumulated in the history of the US government up to that point.<br /><br />But the trajectory was even worse. Economists have a concept known as “fiscal space.” For example, if you are running a $500 billion surplus during an unsustainable bubble, when the crash comes the budget can take a $1 trillion hit (as a result of a decline in tax revenue and an increase in spending on "automatic stabilizers" like unemployment insurance) and still have a manageable deficit of $500 billion. You have some "fiscal space." But if you are already running a $500 billion deficit during boom times (as Bush did), then when the crash comes, you have a $1.5 trillion deficit. NOT a good thing. That is basically what happened during the fiscal year that ended last September.<br /><br />As former Reagan official and <em>Wall Street Journal</em> op-ed writer Bruce Bartlett </span><a href="http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1200/why-economy-needs-spending-not-tax-cuts%20/"><span style="font-family:arial;">noted recently</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: </span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">According to the Congressional Budget Office's January 2009 </span><a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9957/01-07-Outlook.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">estimate</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> for fiscal year 2009, outlays were projected to be $3,543 billion and revenues were projected to be $2,357 billion, leaving a deficit of $1,186 billion. Keep in mind that these estimates were made before Obama took office, based on existing law and policy, and did not take into account any actions that Obama might implement. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Therefore … a deficit of $1.2 trillion was baked in the cake the day Obama took office. … </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Now let's fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to </span><a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10640/10-2009-MBR.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">CBO</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected, but spending was<br />$28 billion and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">It should be further noted that revenues are lower to a large extent because of tax cuts included in the February stimulus. According to the </span><a href="http://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=download&id=1172&chk=61d90bfaa8537335d2a98e04a48399e3&no_html=1"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Joint Committee on axation</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, these tax cuts reduced revenues in FY2009 by $98 billion over what would otherwise have been the case. This is important because the Republican position has<br />consistently been that tax cuts and only tax cuts are an appropriate response to<br />the economic crisis. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">According to the </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/CEA_ARRA_Report_Final.pdf"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Council of Economic Advisers</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, as of August the actual budgetary effect of the February stimulus was to reduce revenues by $62.6 billion and raise spending by $88.8 billion. Of the spending, the vast bulk went to transfers such as extended unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments, which may have prevented cuts in spending that would otherwise have occurred but probably didn't do anything to increase spending. Only $16.5 billion in stimulus funds went to investment outlays for things such as public works. This is a trivial amount of money in a $14 trillion economy. <p></p></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;">[I highly recommend these other </span><a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/17/federal-budget-spending-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">two</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/24/fiscal-spending-taxes-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">pieces</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that Bartlett wrote in Forbes on budget matters. Also, last June, David Leonhardt -- one of the New York Times' best writers on economic subjects -- had a </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">good in-depth piece</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on how Clinton's record budget surpluses turned into our current trillion dollar deficits. Very little of it was the result of spending increases after President Obama took office.] </span><p></p><span style="font-family:arial;">Last March, the Obama administration <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17deficit.html">forecast a $1.8 trillion deficit</a> for the fiscal year that began almost four months before they took office. The actual figure came in at $1.4 trillion, largely because the financial sector recovered faster than expected which reduced the taxpayer cost of last fall’s bailout.<br /><br />As a result of the Bush tax cuts and the Great Recession, by fiscal 2009, federal revenue as a percentage of GDP had fallen to </span><a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10640/10-2009-MBR.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">14.9%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. That is a staggering figure. That is the lowest it has been since 1951 – 58 years ago. By contrast, it was over 20% when President Clinton left office. The simple fact is that we will never get anywhere close to a balanced budget with today’s tax structure. We barely did it with the much higher tax structure President Clinton left behind (and with 2000 spending at 18.4% of GDP – it’s lowest level since 1961).<br /><br />Which brings us to the subject of how to reduce the deficit.<br /><br />Getting back to the earlier discussion, short term the deficit should be larger. We have, as Paul Krugman phrased it, “</span><a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/fifty-little-hoovers.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Fifty Little Hoovers</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” as tax revenue has fallen off a cliff and state (and local) governments are drastically slashing budgets and raising taxes. Raising taxes and cutting spending during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression is a REALLY bad idea. For no other reason, 70% of our economy is consumer spending and it isn't going to revive as long as incomes are plummeting and unemployment is increasing. But states have no choice -- their constitutions required balanced budgets. Only the federal government can make up that gap without making the problem worse. <p></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6zuB5rx2ZV4wIMLtXrRSEC1CAjB3WJ61L1BFkvq7kVOfaNr8hg6Z8jcra8w02_M_8FNUK4UQUgv7l3Fiw_daSA5LSCnuPOOgdQeilsGz26c8QKmn-_waLyvEvvDl_OViTFltQ5VAWZIc/s1600/state+budgets.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 330px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 300px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408190801919428994" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6zuB5rx2ZV4wIMLtXrRSEC1CAjB3WJ61L1BFkvq7kVOfaNr8hg6Z8jcra8w02_M_8FNUK4UQUgv7l3Fiw_daSA5LSCnuPOOgdQeilsGz26c8QKmn-_waLyvEvvDl_OViTFltQ5VAWZIc/s400/state+budgets.jpg" /></a> </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />As </span><a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=711"><span style="font-family:arial;">this graph</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> shows, state governments face almost $500 billion in budget shortfalls over the next three years. Local governments are expected to add another $100 billion or so to that total. That is nearly $600 billion of "anti-stimulus" in the pipeline. So at least to this extent, federal stimulus just offsets the contractionary actions of the “Fifty Little Hoovers.”<br /><br />But when it does come time to close the federal budget gap again, there are really only three big targets:<br /><br />1/ Taxes,<br />2/ Health care spending; and<br />3/ Military spending.<br /><br />Everything else is noise. TOTAL non-military discretionary spending -- everything from the entire judicial branch, the entire legislative branch, the Department of Homeland Security, immigration and naturalization, our nationals parks, education, public health, highways, air traffic control, the FBI, water projects, prisons, NASA, state aid, etc. -- is running at around $600 billion a year, less than half the federal deficit and less than military spending alone (which should top $700 billion this year -- even before any escalation in Afghanistan). Realistically, you can’t cut domestic discretionary spending enough to make a serious dent in the deficit.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Taxes</strong>: Let's start with taxes because that was the source of thegreatest erosion in the federal budget under both Reagan and Bush and it was the primary means by which the budget was subsequently brought into balance under President Clinton. Almost every Republican member of Congress (172 of 177 Republicans in the House and 33 of 40 Republican Senators) has signed Grover Norquist’s </span><a href="http://www.atr.org/current-taxpayer-protection-pledge-signers-th-a2851"><span style="font-family:arial;">pledge</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to never raise taxes by ANY amount at ANY time for ANY reason. So right there you can count out any Republican role in any serious deficit-reduction effort. But it gets worse. Not only will no Republican vote to raise taxes, they continue to urge further tax CUTS in the face of trillion dollar deficts and revenue at its lowest level since 1951. Earlier this year, for example, 35 Republican Senators voted for an </span><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/29076/its-all-part-of-my-stimulus-fantasy"><span style="font-family:arial;">alternative to the stimulus plan </span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">that would permanently cut taxes at a ten-year cost of $3 trillion. This was not a temporary stimulus measure, but a further permanent reduction in revenue that would add $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. .<br /><br />This leaves Democrats with the choice of doing nothing on taxes or doing what they did in 1993 -- raise taxes with no Republican support and get crushed in the next election. President Obama, as he does on most issues, has attempted to strike a middle ground, pledging no tax increases on those earning less than $250,000. Unfortunately, that may end up being the worst of both worlds -- an inadquate response to the long-term deficit while still giving Republicans the "tax increase" cudgel.<br /><br /><strong>Health Care Spending</strong>: Long-term, health care spending is the biggest problem in the federal budget. Medicare, Medicaid and the State Childrens Health Insurance Program account for about 20% of the federal budget. That doesn't count other federal health care spending on veterans, Indians, military personnel and the health insurance of other federal employees and retirees. Nor does it count the revenue lost from the deductibility of employer-provided health insurance and health savings accounts. Add it all up and it dwarfs any other element of the budget. And the growth in health care costs greatly outstrips inflation. This isn't a government spending problem per se. It is a health care cost problem that affects our entire economy. It is bankrupting businesses and individuals and making our economy less competitive in world markets.<br /><br />President Obama and Congressional Democrats, to their credit, have taken on this challenge as their top legislative priority after the stimulus. But, as with taxes, they have to do it with no Republican help. Even when the Senate Finance Committee stripped out a public health insurance option and an employer mandate -- the elements that Republicans most object to (and which would actually reduce the cost to taxpayers) -- they were able to secure only one lone Republican vote.<br /><br />Ron Brownstein had a </span><a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/a_milestone_in_the_health_care_journey.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">good piece </span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">at <em>The Atlantic</em> site this week where he details the cost-saving measures in the Senate health care bill. It is worth reading the </span><a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/a_milestone_in_the_health_care_journey.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">whole thing</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. He notes: <span style="font-family:georgia;"><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[Jonathan] Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing." </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint ... also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. <p></p></span></blockquote></span>The Republican response to these efforts has been to manufacture lies about "death panels" that will "kill granny". Apparently they were so pleased with the traction they got scaring seniors that they have now made their opposition to efforts to control the long-term growth of Medicare spending the official party position. In August, Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele wrote a </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082302036.html"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Washington Post</em> op-ed</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> where he proposed a "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Right": <span style="font-family:georgia;"><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The Republican Party's contract with seniors includes tenets that Americans, regardless of political party, should support. First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of "health-insurance reform."<br /></span></blockquote></span>It was reported a couple of days ago that Republican leaders are circulating a list of ten policy positions that any Republican candidate would need to commit to in order to secure the support of the party (a so-called "</span><a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/gop-considers-purity-resolution-for-candidates/"><span style="font-family:arial;">purity pledge</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">"). Among the required positions is "opposing health care rationing".<br /><br />So now the Republican Party has become the defender of unconstrained growth in Medicare spending.<br /><br /><strong>Military Spending</strong>: Even though we now spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- over $700 billion in the current year -- for Republicans, it is never enough. The ten-year cost of the Democratic health care bill, which among other things would extend health insurance coverage to 30 million Americans who currently lack it, is not much more than what we spend on the military in just one year. Defense Secretary Gates and President Obama have begun efforts to trim the most blatantly wasteful military spending -- but, for the most part, without Republican help. For example, earlier this year, when Congress voted on cutting off further funding for the $65 billion F-22 fighter program, a majority of Republicans voted against those cuts despite the fact that the Secretary of Defense (originally appointed by President Bush) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff want to terminate the program after 187 aircraft (the aircraft has never been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan). Republicans are also urging President Obama to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan (on top of the 30,000 additional troops he has sent since taking office). That would add $40 billion a year to what we are already spending on that war. Republicans believe in "supporting the troops" -- as long as the cost can be added to our national debt. Forget any tax increase to pay for it.<br /><br />Where does that leave us? After leaving behind trillion dollar deficits, the worst economy since the Great Depression, and two wars going badly, Republicans are now complaining about the deficit. But they don't want to raise taxes. Or cut the growth in Medicare spending. Or cut military spending. In other words, they don't really want to do anything about the deficit except use it as a partisan weapon. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:arial;">As Dick Cheney <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26402-2004Jun8?language=printer">famously said</a> as the Bush administration was squandering our budget surpluses: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”. IOKIRDI (“It’s OK if Reagan did it”).<br /><br />Should the Democrats tackle deficit reduction even without Republican support? As the only party serious about governance, they don't have much choice. But to shift the focus to deficit reduction now, while unemployment is still rising, would be economically unwise and politically suicidal. As it is, Democrats have reinstated the pay-as-you-go budget rules that Republicans abandoned and are working to ensure that new initiatives, like health care reform, don't add to the deficit. And much of the deficit will turn around as the economy eventually recovers. But unemployment is likely to still be over 10% on election day next year. If Democrats don't do a lot more to try to bring that figure down, the economy will still be in horrible shape and voters won't care how much progress Democrats have made on long-term deficit reduction. Earning the praise of political pundits who see deficits as the bigger problem will be of little solace to Democratic members of Congress when they have joined the ranks of the unemployed.</span><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-1144140096030702982009-11-20T17:47:00.000-08:002009-11-23T22:54:43.173-08:00hannibal lecter's zombie army invades new york<span style="font-family:arial;">I started writing these blog posts (and their email predecessors) to keep my head from exploding during the Bush years. I thought I could get on with my life and largely ignore politics with President Obama and a Democratic Congress in control. Not that there wouldn't still be ego, idiocy and corruption and the inevitable frustrations and compromises of the legislative process. And President Obama was bound to disappoint the stratospheric expectations of him. But at least the crazy right could largely be ignored as essentially inconsequential.<br /><br />But I underestimated the crazy right and its deafening noise machine. In retrospect, the fullness of its craziness had been constrained over recent years by the need to defend the actions of the Worst President in History. Paranoid conspiracies and fantasies of Nazi communists under your bed are harder to sustain when your team controls all the branches of government (including the secret prisons and torture chambers). Now liberated from any actual responsibility for governance, the crazy right has become crazier than ever. If the peace, prosperity, record budget surpluses and small-government deregulatory policies of the Clinton administration caused the right to become totally unhinged, we should have known that it would only escalate with an African-American president coming to office during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, inheriting trillion dollar deficits and two wars going badly.<br /><br />Now that the Republic has survived the existential crisis of President Obama urging school children to work hard and stay in school, the grievous insult to America represented by President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, and the great debates over whether President Obama's gift to the Queen of England was insufficiently respectful or his greeting to the Emperor of Japan too respectful, we can return to the real passion of the paranoid right -- fear mongering.<br /><br />Did you know President Obama is planning on bringing Hannibal Lecter to New York City to stand trial? He goes by the name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed these days, but his latest disguise can't fool us. No maximum security prison can hold him. The moment he steps foot in the United States, he will use the hypnotizing, x-ray telepathic superpowers he honed in the caves of Afghanistan to overpower his guards, flee to Iowa and gnaw on the bones of elderly white Faux News viewers. His legions of zombie soldiers will march in to New York from ... somewhere and ... do something. Hannibal Mohammed and his zombie army have restrained themselves over the past six and a half years while he was being tortured in secret prisons, just waiting for the ultimate provocation -- access to the American judicial system. That was the final straw -- now they are <em><strong>really</strong></em> mad.<br /><br />Or something like that.<br /><br />(I guess we should have seen this coming when President Obama ended the practice of torture. Legal due process and public trials were only a matter of time. That’s just the kind of thing a fascist socialist would do.)<br /><br />Once again, New Yorker Jon Stewart has risen to the occasion. It is hard to improve on </span><a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-16-2009/law---order--ksm"><span style="font-family:arial;">this segment</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. This clip really is a must-see.<br /><br /><table style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f5f5f5; FONT: 11px arial; COLOR: #333" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="360" height="353"><tbody><tr style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e5e5e5" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-TOP: 2px"><a style="COLOR: #333; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style="TEXT-ALIGN: right; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; PADDING-TOP: 2px">Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 14px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 1px; PADDING-TOP: 2px" colspan="2"><a style="COLOR: #333; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-16-2009/law---order--ksm" target="_blank">Law & Order: KSM</a></td></tr><tr style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #353535; HEIGHT: 14px" valign="center"><td style="TEXT-ALIGN: right; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; WIDTH: 360px; PADDING-RIGHT: 5px; OVERFLOW: hidden; PADDING-TOP: 2px" colspan="2"><a style="COLOR: #96deff; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/" target="_blank">http://www.thedailyshow.com/</a></td></tr><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><embed style="DISPLAY: block" height="301" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="360" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:255709" wmode="window" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="autoPlay=false" allowscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" bgcolor="#000000"></embed></td></tr><tr style="HEIGHT: 18px" valign="center"><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" colspan="2"><table style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" height="100%"><tbody><tr valign="center"><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes" target="_blank">Daily Show<br />Full Episodes</a></td><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.indecisionforever.com/" target="_blank">Political Humor</a></td><td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; WIDTH: 33%; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 3px"><a style="FONT: 10px arial; COLOR: #333; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/health" target="_blank">Health Care Crisis</a></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />(Stewart had another good take on the subject </span><a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-19-2009/things-not-to-be-thankful-for---silverdome--goldman-sachs---congressional-recess"><span style="font-family:arial;">here at about 3:25 into the segment</span></a> <span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />I particularly like his exchange with Samantha Bee, including this bit: </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Stewart: You fear then for the safety of New Yorkers?<br />Bee: Of New Yorkers? Listen, those guards aren't there to protect <em><strong>us</strong></em> from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.<br />...<br />Bee: I don't trust the media. They lose their [deleted] during trials that don't matter. They are not ready for this.<br />...<br />Stewart: Maybe they learned a lesson. Maybe they won't get so obsessive.<br />Bee: Yes, I imagine they will keep themselves flexible because you never know when they'll have to drop everything to follow a balloon that may or may not have a boy in it.<br /></p></span></blockquote></span>Stewart also does a great job contrasting recent statements by fearmonger-in-chief, Rudy (“a noun, a verb and 9-11”) Giuliani with those he made in 2006 supporting the Bush administration’s successful prosecution of the “20th hijacker” (one of several “</span></p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_hijacker"><span style="font-family:arial;">20th hijackers</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” actually) Zacarias Moussaoui in federal court in Virginia. Indeed, this is ultimately the most concise refutation to the parade of fears now coming from the right: We are not operating in a void of experience here. This has been done before. Moussaoui was convicted in a civilian court in the US and now sits in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado (along with 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, Oklahoma City bomb conspirator Terry Nichols, FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Jose Padilla, and a host of other charming folks). The world didn’t come to an end. But, of course, the right didn’t come unhinged then because Bush was president and the right-wing noise machine (e.g., <em>Faux News</em>, the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page, <em>Weekly Standard</em>, <em>National Review</em>, <em>Washington Times</em>, etc.) and Republican politicians weren’t engaged in any of the fear mongering they are now.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">New Yorker Josh Marshall had a </span><a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/11/a_lot_of_people_--.php#more"><span style="font-family:arial;">good post on the subject</span></a> <span style="font-family:arial;">. He respectfully notes the three main lines of attack on the decision to try KSM and others in New York: </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"></p></span></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Let's start with the idea that civilian trials have too many safeguards and create too big a risk these guys will go free. This does not hold up to any scrutiny for two reasons. First, remember all those high-profile terror prosecutions where the defendants went free? Right, me neither. It just does not happen. The fact is that federal judges are extremely deferential to the government in terror prosecutions. And national security law already gives the government the ability to do lots of things the government would never be allowed to do in a conventional civilian trial.<br /></p></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><span style="font-family:arial;">He then dissects each of those arguments: </span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Let's start with the idea that civilian trials have too many safeguards and create too big a risk these guys will go free. This does not hold up to any scrutiny for two reasons. First, remember all those high-profile terror prosecutions where the defendants went free? Right, me neither. It just does not happen. The fact is that federal judges are extremely deferential to the government in terror prosecutions. And national security law already gives the government the ability to do lots of things the government would never be allowed to do in a conventional civilian trial. ... </span><br /></p><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Finally, even in the extremely unlikely case that any of the five were acquitted of these charges, the government has a hundred other things it can charge them with. Indeed, the government could as easily turn them over to military commissions or indefinite detention post-acquittal as it can do those things with them now. That may not make civil libertarians happy. But it is the nail in the coffin of any suggestions that these guys are going to be walking out of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan saying they're headed to Disneyland. It's simply not going to happen.</span> </span><br /></p></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;">(Some might say so what if KSM is acquitted. Just set him free in Times Square with some advance publicity.)<br /><br />Marshall goes on to the second argument: </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Next we have the question of danger to the people of New York City. ... [J]ust on the facts I don't think al Qaeda terrorists are holding off on attacking New York now because they lack an incentive or feel we haven't pushed things far enough yet to merit another hit. The symbolic value of hitting New York might increase a bit. But it's already so high for these people that the increase seems notional at best. And more to the point, I choose to trust the people already charged with keeping the city safe. </span><br /></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">On a more general level, however, since when is it something we advertise or say proudly that we're going to change our behavior because we fear terrorists will attack us if we don't? To be unPC about it, isn't there some residual national machismo that<br />keeps us from cowering even before trivially increased dangers? As much as I think the added dangers are basically nil, I'm surprised that people can stand up and say we should change what we do in response to some minuscule added danger and not be embarrassed.<br /></p></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"></span>Finally, there is the fear of what KSM and other defendant's might say: </span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">I cannot imagine anything KSM or his confederates would say that would diminish America or damage us in any way. Are we really so worried that what we represent is so questionable or our identity so brittle? (Some will say, yes: torture. The fact that some of these men were tortured is a huge stain on the country. But it happened and it's known about. To the extent that it is a stain it is the kind of stain that is diminished not made worse by an open public accounting.) Does anyone think that Nuremberg trials or the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 or the war crimes trials of Slobodan<br />Milosevic and others at the Hague advanced these mens' causes? Or that, in retrospect, it would have been wiser to hold these trials in secret? </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">At the end of the day, what are we afraid these men are going to say?</span></p></blockquote></span></span><blockquote></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">What we seem to be forgetting here is that trials are not simply for judging guilt and meting out punishment. We hold trials in public not only because we want a check on the government's behavior but because a key part of the exercise is a public<br />accounting and condemnation of wrongs. Especially in great trials for the worst<br />crimes they are public displays pitting one set of values against another. And I'm troubled by anyone who thinks that this is a confrontation in which we would come out the worse.<br /></p></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;"></span><span style="font-family:arial;">Two top officials in the Bush justice department, deputy attorney general Jim Comey and assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith, have a </span><a title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/19/AR2009111903470.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/19/AR2009111903470.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR"><span style="font-family:arial;">good piece in today’s Washington Post</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:arial;"> defending the decision to try KSM and others in New York.<br /></span><br />In fairness, the right has not been unanimous in its fear mongering on this subject. To my considerable surprise, anti-tax godfather Grover Norquist joined David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, and former Republican representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr in a public statement saying that moving suspected terrorists to as US prison, "makes good sense," and that, "The scaremongering about these issues should stop." (Grover Norquist has now joined </span><a title="http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/democratic-national-committee/gingrich-condemns-conservative-leaders-for-driving-liberal-goper-out-of-ny-race/" href="http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/democratic-national-committee/gingrich-condemns-conservative-leaders-for-driving-liberal-goper-out-of-ny-race/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Newt Gingrich</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a title="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/10/oh_pat.php" href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/10/oh_pat.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Pat Buchanan</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> as a voice for moderation within the Republican Party? Is it only a matter of time until someone outflanks Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck?) It's hard to improve upon </span><a title="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/16/conservative-trio-support_n_358928.html" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/16/conservative-trio-support_n_358928.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">their statement</span></a> <span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></p></span></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">As it moves to close Guantanamo and develop policies for handling terrorism suspects going forward, the government should rely upon our established, traditional system of justice. This includes our system of federal prisons, which have repeatedly proven they can safely hold persons convicted of terrorism offenses.<br /><br />We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries.<br /><br />Civilian federal courts are the proper forum for terrorism cases. Civilian prisons are the safe, cost effective and appropriate venue to hold persons convicted in federal courts. Over the last two decades, federal courts constituted under Article III of the U.S. Constitution have proven capable of trying a wide array of terrorism cases, without sacrificing either national security or fair trial standards.<br /><br />Likewise the federal prison system has proven itself fully capable of safely holding literally hundreds of convicted terrorists with no threat or danger to the surrounding community.<br /><br />The scaremongering about these issues should stop.<br /><br />...<br /><br />But most of all it makes sense for America because it is a critical link in the process of closing Guantanamo and getting this country back to using its tried and true, constitutionally sound institutions.<br /></p></span></blockquote>Somehow the Republic has managed to survive for 230 years with due process of law. In fact, until a few years ago, who knew that indefinite imprisonment without legal due process at the unchecked discretion of the president was really an option?</p>UPDATE: </p>Leave it to <a href="http://salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/11/23/tomo">Tom Tomorrow</a> to sum it up in a few cartoon panels:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT7Lqx3g4mvs43Cn1_CT2cIMKlsXjpP3cZEjTicdb_nTWURK_EzCUCTvVnZ3UXjYDgdqa9VrjzjHzerd67pGI22hidzw7cHrMNLtU5Md4kzOWuvyQmtG_ArxJAKADY-aECnVU-cdyeQ4k/s1600/tom+tomorrow+ksm.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 367px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5407552671019052178" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT7Lqx3g4mvs43Cn1_CT2cIMKlsXjpP3cZEjTicdb_nTWURK_EzCUCTvVnZ3UXjYDgdqa9VrjzjHzerd67pGI22hidzw7cHrMNLtU5Md4kzOWuvyQmtG_ArxJAKADY-aECnVU-cdyeQ4k/s400/tom+tomorrow+ksm.jpg" /> <p align="center"></a></p><p align="center"><span style="font-size:78%;">[click to enlarge]<br /></p></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-70389101616238445022009-11-07T17:12:00.000-08:002009-11-08T12:22:15.999-08:00election 2009<span style="font-family:arial;">So, what are the big lessons to draw from this week’s off-year election?<br /><br />Despite all the inane media chatter, one lesson you SHOULDN’T draw is that this represented some kind of stinging rebuke to President Obama or his policies. Obviously, that is the lesson Republicans would like you to draw. And the media have to frame the election in some kind of mega-narrative – why else would anyone west of Buffalo care about the outcome of an election in New York’s Northern-most Congressional District? And with few actual data points – primarily two gubernatorial races and two Congressional races – opinion flows in to fill the factual void. Let me contribute to that vacuous opinion.<br /><br />As Gail Collins </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05collins.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote Thursday</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">There seems to be a semiconsensus across the land that the myriad decisions voters made around the country this week all added up to a terrible blow to the White House. If that’s the way we’re going to go, I don’t think it’s fair to dump all the blame on gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia. …<br /><br />We have a dramatic saga story line brewing here, and I do not want to mess it up by pointing out that Obama’s party won the only two elections that actually had anything to do with the president’s agenda. Those were the special Congressional races in California and upstate New York.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />What lessons <em><strong>can </strong></em>we draw? I think we can safely conclude that during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when states and local governments are being forced to slash budgets and raise taxes to fill the gap left by plummeting revenue, and with the narrow measure of unemployment running over 10% nationally and much higher in many local areas, it’s not a great time to be an incumbent politician, especially a chief executive. (It doesn’t help if you are the former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs or a Wall Street billionaire.)<br /><br />Let’s look at the individual races, starting with the two governor’s races.<br /><br />Here’s Collins again:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine made it clear that the young and minority voters who turned out for Obama will not necessarily show up at the polls in order to re-elect an uncharismatic former Wall Street big shot who failed to deliver on his most important campaign promises while serving as the public face of a state party that specializes in getting indicted.<br /></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />Corzine is one of the most unpopular governor’s in the country. As far back as </span><a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1299.xml?ReleaseID=1183"><span style="font-family:arial;">April 2006</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, his approval rating was an abysmal 35% -- and that was long <em><strong>before</strong></em> the financial crisis and the Great Recession (and, I might add, ten months before Barack Obama even declared his candidacy for president). By June of this year it was </span><a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1299.xml?ReleaseID=1312"><span style="font-family:arial;">still languishing at 36%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Under the circumstances, the fact that he lost his bid for reelection by less than five percentage points is actually rather remarkable. In fairness to the Republican Party, his opponent, Chris Christie, was also a weak candidate. A better candidate should have crushed Corzine.<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1KYe8Yo2WqAQwUHQcNrXfnrr-vb8ELnjb5f_iKc1tZuefk-fnmA32jA3sDxdqhSoGQetvYLIdRa4qiphuwZhLpn67cEbWQPYUYNA5FNFrhfU01a_ZGT2zfj-p6h-9HaqPsZ9GflyvyDM/s1600-h/corzine.bmp"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 396px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 311px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5401537190494104194" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1KYe8Yo2WqAQwUHQcNrXfnrr-vb8ELnjb5f_iKc1tZuefk-fnmA32jA3sDxdqhSoGQetvYLIdRa4qiphuwZhLpn67cEbWQPYUYNA5FNFrhfU01a_ZGT2zfj-p6h-9HaqPsZ9GflyvyDM/s400/corzine.bmp" /></a><br />As you can see from <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/new-jersey-virginia.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">this chart</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, Corzine with 45% of the vote significantly outperformed his 37% approval rating. For that matter, Christie failed to get even 50% of the vote. (Independent Chris Daggett – no relation – got 6% of the vote.)<br /><br />Christie made no attempt to “nationalize” the election (unlike Corzine who benefitted from campaign appearances by President Obama). Not once in any of Christie’s campaign ads did he ever mention Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the Democrats' health care plan or the stimulus package. Not only did he not attack President Obama, he actually </span><a href="http://beltwayblips.dailyradar.com/video/youtube_christie_guadagno_tv_ad_voices/"><span style="font-family:arial;">ran TV ads featuring positive references to the Obama campaign</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and invoking his message of “Change.” (And check out Christie’s obsequious “</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPODwcCFr_8"><span style="font-family:arial;">Message to President Obama</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” welcoming him to New Jersey.) Obviously, that is a smart tactic in a heavily-Democratic state. But it makes it hard for Republicans to subsequently claim that it was a referendum on President Obama (well, it doesn’t make it hard from them to do it – just hard to do it credibly).<br /><br />Then there are the exit polls. Among those who actually voted in the New Jersey election this week, </span><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=8984551"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama’s approval rating was 57%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> -- identical to his share of the New Jersey vote last year. This is impressive given that New Jersey voters this year were older and white than last year’s voters, suggesting President Obama’s approval rating is actually up in that state. According to a </span><a href="http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/11/3/173721/146"><span style="font-family:arial;">CNN exit poll</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, 60 percent of New Jersey voters said that President Obama played no role in their gubernatorial vote, 19 percent said that their vote was one in support of the President, and 20 percent saying that their vote was in opposition to President. The 17% of New Jersey voters who identified health care as their most important issue went for </span><a href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/11/04/2009.exit.polls.-.nj.gov.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">Corzine by a 4-to-1 margin</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (not exactly consistent with the notion that this was a vote protesting health care reform in DC).<br /><br />The CNN exit poll showed the same thing in Virginia: A 55 percent majority of voters said that the President was not a factor in their vote, and an additional 18 percent indicated their vote in Virginia was one of support in the President. Just 24 percent of voters indicated that their vote was one of opposition to President Obama. In Virginia the change in the make-up of the electorate was particularly stark. As </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05teixeira.html?ref=opinion"><span style="font-family:arial;">Ruy Teixeira wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the <em>New York Times</em>:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">In Virginia, while the president’s 2009 approval rating was 5 points less than his 2008 voting result, the 2009 electorate was also far more conservative than last year’s. Besides being far older and whiter than in 2008, the voters in Virginia on Tuesday said they had supported John McCain last November by 8 points, meaning they were not favorably inclined toward President Obama to begin with. In fact, given that only 43 percent of these voters said they supported Mr. Obama last November, his 48 percent approval rating among them does not indicate a shift away from him but rather toward him.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />It’s hard to see how a vote against the Democratic candidate in Virginia, Creigh Deeds, was a vote against Democrats in Washington – he did everything he could to distance himself from any position that might actually inspire the Democratic base to turn out. From </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/04/creigh-deeds-campaign/"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>ThinkProgress</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /></span><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[<strong>On energy policy</strong>:] By the end of his campaign, Deeds was running ads attacking Obama’s clean energy agenda, saying Obama’s “cap and trade bill” would “</span><a href="http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/10/23/obama-socialist-critics/"><span style="font-family:georgia;">hurt the people</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> of Virginia.” Other ads carried the same message: “</span><a href="http://getenergysmartnow.com/2009/10/07/who-is-creigh-deeds-speaking-to-and-what-is-he-saying/"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Creigh Deeds says no</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> to any new energy taxes from Washington.” Instead of disputing his Republican opponent’s false attacks on climate legislation, Deeds amplified them. … During the primary season, Deeds </span><a href="http://thegreenmiles.blogspot.com/2009/03/creigh-deeds-coal-industry-spokesman.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">defended the despicable practice</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> of mountaintop removal, telling a reporter in March, “</span><a href="http://www.bluevirginia.us/2009/03/creigh-deeds-on-mountaintop-removal.html"><span style="font-family:georgia;">The coal industry</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> calls it surface mining.” . </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">[<strong>On health care policy</strong>:] During the final gubernatorial debate, Deeds stressed that health reform must “reduce costs so more people can afford insurance” and “increase coverage,” but argued that creating the option of a public health care plan “</span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/21/795518/-Deeds-Trashes-Public-Option,-Suggests-Va.-Will-Opt-Out-If-He-Is-Elected.-"><span style="font-family:georgia;">isn’t required</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">.” “I don’t think the public option is necessary in any plan…I would certainly consider opting out if that were available to Virginia,” he said. … <p></p></span></span></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Deeds also tacked right on labor (opposing the top legislative priorities of organized labor) and immigration issues (among other things, voting to designate English as the state’s official language). The result, predictably, was an absolutely horrible Democratic turn out. Interestingly, despite the heavy GOP tilt to the 2009 electorate, the </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/04/us/politics/1104-va-exit-poll.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">24% of Virginia voters</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> who cited health care as their main issue still went for the Democrat Deeds by a 51 to 49 margin. And the 42% of Virginia voters who described themselves as “moderate” also broke for Deeds, 53 to 47. But conservatives outnumbered liberals 40 to 18% -- reflecting a more motivated turnout on the right. That was the key to Republicans success.<br /><br />Virginia, which holds its gubernatorial race in the off-year after presidential election, has a history </span><a href="http://www.uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=printpage;topic=15980.0"><span style="font-family:arial;">going back 32 years to 1977</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> of always electing a governor of the party opposing the president elected (or re-elected) the previous year. For example, in November 2001, Virginians elected Democrat Mark Warner (now a US Senator) to be governor. At the time, George W. Bush enjoyed an </span><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/14/bush.poll/"><span style="font-family:arial;">86% approval rating</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (due entirely to 9-11 two months earlier – just days prior to 9-11 </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=VaTk6fgyCEkC&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=george+bush+approval+poll+51%25+%22september+2001%22+gallup&source=bl&ots=UyH2Pbt7qy&sig=zWeI6bgR8j0uqJ9oHB6OWCW3HcI&hl=en&ei=2MbzSq7vC5SCswOzuqEX&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved="><span style="font-family:arial;">his approval rating was 51%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). No one was claiming at that time that Warner’s election represented a rebuke to Bush. And, yes, even the year after </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/10/great-myths-of-ronaldus-magnus.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Ronaldus Magnus</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> was elected president in 1980, Democrat Chuck Robb was elected governor of Virginia (and Democrat Gerald Baliles was elected in 1985, the year after Reagan’s re-election). Reagan’s presidency managed to survive. (In an interesting aside, Reagan’s approval rating in </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/17/us/gallup-poll-finds-rise-in-approval-of-reagan.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">October 1981 was 56%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> -- identical to President Obama’s </span><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/123629/obama-job-approval-56-after-nobel-win.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">56% last month</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />None of this is meant to suggest that it was actually a good thing for Democrats to lose those two governor races. They represent genuine gains for Republicans and Republicans are to be congratulated for running better campaigns than the Democrats in those states. Deeds, in particular, was a weak candidate who ran a miserable campaign. But it is a stretch to argue that either race was a mandate on President Obama. Indeed, both Republican candidates resisted efforts to “nationalize” their races and focused, instead, on local issues.<br /><br />The only two Federal races on Tuesday were the special elections in New York’s 23rd Congressional District and California’s 10th Congressional District. Let’s start with the easy one.<br /><br />Did you even hear about this race? Democrat John Garamendi won by 10 points in the district formerly represented by Ellen Tauscher, whom President Obama named to a State Department position. Although this is a pretty safe Democratic district, Tauscher was a “New Democrat” who tended to frustrate progressives by voting as if she represented a swing district. Garamendi, by contrast, is a whole-hearted progressive. To take one particularly timely example, he not only supports a robust public option, </span><a href="http://www.garamendi.org/node/339"><span style="font-family:arial;">he supports a single-payer health care system</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />NY-23, by contrast, has been represented only by Republicans pretty much ever since there has been a Republican Party – going back to 1872. As you no doubt heard, the Democrat, Bill Owens, won the race to fill the seat vacated by Republican John McHugh, whom President Obama named to be Secretary of the Army. His opponent, Don Hoffman, was a far-right, third-party candidate who had become the darling of the Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck crowd. As it appeared to become a two-man race between Hoffman and Owens, the official Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, dropped out and endorsed the Democrat. This is the one race that Republicans clearly framed as a referendum on DC Democrats, as Sarah Palin, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and a host of other national Republicans came into the district to campaign for Hoffman. This teabagger insurgency ended up putting a safe Republican district into the Democratic column on election night. (Had Scozzafava not received 6% of the vote as a result of early absentee ballots, Owens probably would have had a margin even bigger than his eventual 4% win.) Owens has already been sworn into office and will be on hand for the vote on the House’s health care bill today, or whenever it takes place. He has said </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/owens-announces-support-for-house-dems-health-care-bill.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">he plans to vote for the bill</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br />Admittedly, the circumstances of the NY-23 race were so bizarre that it is hard to generalize the results to other races. (The </span><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scozzafavaed"><span style="font-family:arial;">Urban Dictionary</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> now recognizes “scozzafavaed” as verb meaning “purged of moderation.”) </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/opinion/07collins.html?_r=1&hp"><span style="font-family:arial;">More from Collins today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Meanwhile, there’s nothing but confidence and serenity among the right-wing tea-party types. They cannot get over the triumph in upstate New York, where thanks to their really extraordinary efforts, a completely safe Republican seat went to the Democrats. Think how far their movement has come! Only a few months ago, they barely had the power to disrupt a town meeting. And soon they will be able to destroy anything in their path, including their own party, like conservative locusts.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />The bottom line from Tuesday’s election is that Nancy Pelosi has two more votes for health care reform than she had a week ago. (Republicans have now lost </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/fifth%20consecutive%20competitive%20special%20election%20in%20Republican-friendly%20territory."><span style="font-family:arial;">five consecutive competitive special elections in Republican-friendly territory</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.)<br /><br />The anti-incumbent mojo was at work in New York City, as Michael Bloomberg had to spend over $100 million of his own money – more than either Bush or Kerry spent on their general election campaigns in 2004 – to barely vanquish his Democratic opponent, securing only 50.6% of the vote. (Quick: Name Bloomberg’s Democratic opponent.) At least he didn’t buy any more votes than necessary. (That reminds me of the apocryphal story of the cable John F. Kennedy received from his rich father, Joseph P. Kennedy, during his first run for Congress: “</span><a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotes/joseph_p._kennedy/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.”) Bloomberg’s spending worked out to around $180 per vote. Too bad voters didn’t have the option of just taking the money and skipping all the campaign ads. (A bit of trivia: Did you know the population of New York City at </span><a href="http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-NewYork.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">8.3 million</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> is higher than that of Virginia at </span><a href="http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&idim=state:51000&q=virginia+population"><span style="font-family:arial;">7.7 million</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and only slightly less than that of New Jersey at </span><a href="http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&idim=state:34000&q=new+jersey+population"><span style="font-family:arial;">8.6 million</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">? At least this wasn’t being touted as a big defeat for President Obama.)<br /><br />One of the biggest disappointments on Tuesday night was the passage of Maine’s Referendum 1 which overturned the state’s gay marriage law. </span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/6/801306/-Cheers-and-Jeers:-Rum-and-Coke-FRIDAY!"><span style="font-family:arial;">Conan O’Brien</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> had an interesting observation:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Voters in the state of Maine voted no to gay marriage, but yes to medical marijuana. That’s right---people in Maine believe marriage should be a sacred institution between a really stoned man and a really stoned woman."<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />In the glass-half-full department, the good news is that over 47% of Maine voters supported gay marriage. And Maine isn’t California … or even Vermont. It is a pretty conservative place (you might have heard that it has two Republican Senators). Who could have imagined this result five years ago, let alone ten years ago? Young voters overwhelming have no problem with the idea of two people of the same sex entering into a committed lifetime relationship. It’s only a matter of time. On the same night, Washington State voters defeated a referendum that would have repealed the state’s “everything-but-marriage” law. (Stephen Colbert had a </span><a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/252735/october-26-2009/the-word---don-t-ask-don-t-tell"><span style="font-family:arial;">good segment on Referendum 71</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, if you happened to miss it.) In so doing, Washington became the first state in the country to approve a gay-equality measure not by court fiat or legislative action, but by the direct will of the people. And Houston (of all places) may become the largest city in the country with an openly gay mayor (Annise Parker was the top vote-getter on Tuesday heading into a run-off next month).<br /><br />Washington State and Maine also both decisively defeated ballot measures modeled on Colorado’s disastrous “Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR)” measure (which Colorado voters later largely repealed after their state fell to #49 nationally in per capita state spending on education among other things). If Tuesday was supposedly a big victory for anti-government teabagger types, the voters of Washington and Maine apparently didn’t get the memo.<br /><br />What does all of this portend for 2010? Not much, I think. But I don’t think Democrats have any reason to be sanguine. A bad economy tends to overwhelm just about everything else and the US economy will almost certainly still be very bad a year from now. Unemployment is now over 10% and is unlikely to be much lower next November (I hope to come up with a post on unemployment in the next few days). Tax revenue is plummeting – at the federal level it has fallen below 15% of GDP, its lowest level since 1950 (!). At the state level, that means huge spending cuts and/or tax increases. In that environment, I wouldn’t want to be a governor running for reelection.<br /><br />There are 37 governor’s seats up in 2010 with the current occupants almost evenly split between Democrats (19) and Republicans (18). After Tuesday’s election, the </span><a href="http://www.cookpolitical.com/charts/governors/raceratings_2009-11-04_13-35-36.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Cook Report</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> designated another seven of those seats as being in peril for the incumbent party (four Republican and three Democratic). Overall, Cook considers eight Democratic seats and nine Republican seats at risk, but with Republicans having the edge in four of those and Democrats in none.<br /><br />After two blow-out elections, Democrats almost certainly will lose seats in the House – the question is just how many. Democrats picked up 27 House seats (and no Senate seats) in Reagan’s first mid-term election in 1982; Republicans picked up 54 House seats and eight Senate seats in Clinton’s first mid-term in 1994. (Bush’s first mid-term in 2002 was a bit of an aberration because of his continuing post-9/11 bump – Republicans actually picked up seven House seats and two Senate seats in that election.)<br /><br />In the Senate, 38 seats are up in 2010, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. </span><a href="http://www.cookpolitical.com/charts/senate/raceratings_2009-11-04_09-28-15.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Cook</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> currently has 6 Democratic seats and 5 Republican seats in the “toss-up” category. Until likely opponents are defined, it is too early to have either leaning toward a pick up by one party or the other. At this point, if I had to guess, I think it is likely the Democrats will lose anywhere from one to three Senate seats. The best case scenario at this point is probably Democrats holding their own – a net Democratic pick up is unlikely. But it is still too early to be making even educated guesses.<br /><br />While the bad economy is a virtual certainty, favoring Republicans and challengers generally, the wild card is the fanaticism on the right. If I were a Republican I would be worried that the forces that were at work in NY-23 this year could result in successful primary challenges to Republican incumbents and a lot of candidates from the far right of the political spectrum ending up on the ballot. This dynamic could at least partially neutralize the advantages that Republicans should have as the out-of-power party in a mid-term election with a horrible economy.<br /><br />And there are other reasons for optimism among Democrats.<br /><br />The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans is at a record low. The </span><a href="http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/party-id.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">pollster.com average of polls</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> currently has that number at 22% (vs. 34.6% for Democrats). While that is significant, I wouldn’t read too much into it. A lot of folks who used to call themselves Republicans now prefer to identify as Independents – and many of them are actually to the right of the Republican Party, not somewhere in the center. Also, people tend to jump on the winning bandwagon – with Democrats in control of everything, there is a natural tendency for Republican self-identification to decline. Still – 22% is pretty miserable.<br /><br />And for what it is worth, a </span><a href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/11/02/rel16b.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">CNN poll this week</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> continues to show Democrats with a six-point edge (50-41) on the generic ballot among registered voters (i.e., asking voters which party they would rather see controlling Congress). An </span><a href="http://www.pollster.com/blogs/us_national_survey_ipsos_10291.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">Ipsos/McClatchy poll</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> gives Democrats a seven-point edge (48-41) on the generic ballot test.<br /><br />Much will depend on what President Obama and Congressional Democrats are able to actually accomplish over the next year. Like an off-year election, a mid-term election is all about turnout. There is little likelihood that Democrats will be able to generate the kind of turnout among young voters and minority groups for a mid-term election that they did for the general election in 2008. But if Democrats are seen as delivering on their promises and making genuine progress, they could do OK. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">I think the populist anger is real and it is big, particularly against the financial bailout – and that is not necessarily partisan or right or left. If Democrats don’t deliver on meaningful financial reform, I think there will be a big backlash, including among Democratic voters. Democrats will also suffer if they don’t deliver on meaningful health care reform. If Democratic members of Congress revert to form, get scared of their own shadows and pull back from any meaningful accomplishments, the story of the 2010 election could be all about turnout on the right (the Virginia governor race writ large).<br /><br />And that is not a pretty picture. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-92112327104014512822009-10-20T13:33:00.000-07:002009-11-06T17:58:25.516-08:00the great myths of ronaldus magnus<span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Can you imagine how the right-wing noise machine would react if President Obama: </span><br /><br /><br /><ul><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Increased federal spending as a percentage of the economy to levels previously seen only during World War II.</span></li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Tripled the national debt.</span></li><li><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:arial;">Dramatically increased Social Security payroll taxes on employees and employers. </li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Increased the capital gains tax to 28%. </li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Raised gas taxes. </li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">I<span style="font-family:arial;">ncreased federal government employment. </li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Created a massive new cabinet department.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Sold arms to Iran. </li></span><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Withdrew entirely from a Middle Eastern war zone in response to a single deadly terrorist attack against US troops. </span></li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Funded terrorist groups in our own hemisphere. </li></span><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Signed a treaty committing to make deep cuts in our strategic nuclear weapons. </span></li><li><span style="font-family:arial;">Proposed the total elimination of nuclear weapons.</li></ul></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>I'm sure there would not be enough tea in India to express the wingnut outrage.<br /><br />And what if the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building">most expensive federal office building in history</a> was subsequently named after him? I'm sure it would be mocked as a fitting legacy to this “big government” president.<br /><br />The president I'm describing is, of course, Ronald Reagan.<br /><br />Is it just me or have you noticed a surge in Ronald Reagan adulation lately? Of course, he achieved Republican sainthood a long time ago. But for the past eight years it was Bush who could do no wrong. Anyone who criticized Bush hated America and if the critic happened to be a Republican he or she was excommunicated. Even as he left office during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the federal deficit running well over $1 trillion/year and two wars going badly, Bush still commanded an <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/113770/bush-presidency-closes-34-approval-61-disapproval.aspx"><span style="font-family:arial;">approval rating among Republicans of 75%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Think about that. Three out of four Republicans still thought Bush had done a good job. (And that was even after the financial and auto bailouts, now the subject of rage among many of those very same Bush supporters.) Makes you wonder what it would take for Republicans to think he had screwed up.<br /><br />In fairness, Republicans now seem to have more or less thrown in the towel when it comes to defending Bush's legacy. So they have had to reach back over twenty years to Reagan for a time when their Dear Leader could do no wrong. (Bush's recent disappearance from Republican idolatry is kind of like one of those Chinese Communist Politburo photos that has been altered to remove the guy who is now in prison.)<br /><br />Last week, the new Republican National Committee Web site was launched and it included in its “GOP Heroes” section a </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/rnc-web-site-pays-tribute-to-ronaldus-magnus.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">reference</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to Reagan as “<em>Ronaldus Magnus</em>” (that’s Latin for “Ronald the Great”). Now, I will confess to being among those who hold President Obama in high regard. But as far as I am aware the Democratic Party hasn’t taken to referring to him with a title befitting a Roman emperor.<br /><br />One of Reagan’s biggest cheerleaders over the years has been his former speechwriter and now <em>Wall Street Journal</em> op-ed writer Peggy Noonan. She had a </span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574464083239280914.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Journal piece</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> last week saying that it was “absurd” that Reagan hadn’t gotten the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing about the fall of the Berlin wall.<br /><br />Which is what prompted me to write this post.<br /><br />The myth that Reagan brought about the end of the Cold War has become so entrenched that it is no longer even questioned. Next time someone makes that assertion, pose this one-word question: “How?” </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">You might get an answer something like this: Reagan gave a speech where he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and 29 months later the Berlin Wall came down. What more evidence of causation do you need? </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Post hoc ergo propter hoc</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (“After this, therefore because of this”). “A” happened, then “B” happened. Therefore, “A” caused “B”. For example, I can stand on the beach at high tide and successfully command the water to recede. And unlike Reagan and the Berlin Wall, I can repeat this trick. Twice a day.<br /><br />A more sophisticated theory of how Reagan ended the Cold War goes like this: Reagan’s big military build up caused the Soviets to overspend in an attempt to keep up which bankrupted the Soviet economy. This explanation has the benefit of a plausible theory of causation. But let’s break it down. We spent a huge amount of money on the military during the ‘80’s (a true statement). The Soviets tried to keep up with our escalating military spending (an untrue statement). The Soviet economy collapsed (a true statement). Can you spot the problem? The Soviets didn’t attempt to match our military build up. We greatly increased our military spending during the ‘80’s (tripling the national debt in the process), </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/reagrus.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">but the Soviets didn’t</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The Soviet Union's defense spending did not rise or fall in response to American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense.<br /><br />If American defense spending had bankrupted the Soviet economy, forcing an end to the Cold War, Soviet defense spending should have declined as East-West relations improved. CIA estimates show that it remained relatively constant as a proportion of the Soviet gross national product during the 1980s, including Gorbachev's first four years in office. Soviet defense spending was not reduced until 1989 and did not decline nearly as rapidly as the overall economy.</span> </blockquote></span>Go ahead – research it yourself. Google (or “Bing”) “soviet military spending” and read everything you can find on the subject. You can start </span><a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mo-budget.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> or </span><a href="http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Politics/fitzgerald.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> or </span><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0610-08.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Or just take my word for it. This is not a matter of serious factual dispute.<br /><br />A lot of things contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Basically, their economic system sucked. You’d think right wingers would be satisfied with that explanation. You don’t really have to come up with a heroic story line with the US at the center – Soviet-style communism was perfectly capable of collapsing on its own. But if you do need US heroics, you can point to the policy of “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment"><span style="font-family:arial;">containment</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” begun with Truman and George Keenan and supported by both parties for 40 years. (The wingnuts at the time wanted to pursue a policy of “regime change” against Stalin, but after two world wars our country wasn’t much in the mood for more war, especially against a country that had been our ally in defeating the Nazis.)<br /><br />I would argue that a key event in that Cold War history was the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 by President Ford, whereby the Soviet Union agreed to international principles of human rights, which gave rise to groups monitoring human rights within the Soviet Union and its satellites. As noted in </span><a title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Wikipedia</em></span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">However, the civil rights portion of the agreement provided the basis for the work of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an independent non-governmental organization created to monitor compliance to the Helsinki Accords (which evolved into several regional committees, eventually forming the International Helsinki Federation and Human Rights Watch). While these provisions applied to all signatories, the focus of attention was on their application to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. </span><p></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "[Leonid] Brezhnev had looked forward, [Anatoly] Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final<br />settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'...<br />'[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."<br /><p></p></span></blockquote></span>Another key event was the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland which began the unraveling of Soviet control of Eastern Europe. Polish independence was certainly encouraged by native son Karol Józef Wojtyła becoming Pope John Paul II in 1978. But it was the famous strike at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, led by Lech Walesa, that gave birth to Solidarity, the first non-communist controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries. That was in September of 1980 – when Jimmy Carter was president (if only Walesa had held off another four months this, too, could have been credited to Reagan).<br /><br />Another factor was the spread of information technology that helped undermine centralized control. I traveled to the Soviet Union in 1990 just as it was collapsing. Their economy was bleak. I remember being told by people I met that they always knew they had it tough, but they had been led to believe that they had it much better than those of us in the West. It was the decentralization of information technology (the fax machine was the revolutionary technology at the time) that made Soviet citizens aware of just how bad they had it. That brought with it a huge sense of betrayal – that their leaders had been lying to them all those years and they had been enduring hardships to no good end.<br /><br />The Soviet Union’s nine-year quagmire in Afghanistan certainly didn’t help things. As a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, President Carter ended Nixon’s policy of “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tente"><span style="font-family:arial;">détente</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” toward the Soviet Union and began funding the Mujahedeen fighting them in Afghanistan. He also imposed a trade embargo on the Soviet Union (and boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics). The Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 – leaving them drained militarily, economically and emotionally. (Afghanistan – where empires go to die.)<br /><br />But perhaps the straw that broke the Soviet Union’s back was the collapse of oil prices in the ‘80’s. In 1980, as a result of the Iran-Iraq war drastically curtailing oil production in both of those countries, the price of oil reached a high of $39.50/barrel, a record high in inflation-adjusted terms until last year, equal to more than $100/barrel today. As energy conservation measures begun in the ‘70’s really kicked in (</span><a href="http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/intensityindicators/total_energy.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">between 1973 and 1985, the energy/gdp ratio in the US declined by 28%</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), the price of oil fell again, and by 1988 it averaged </span><a href="http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Table.asp"><span style="font-family:arial;">below $15/barrel for the year</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. That was great for big oil importers like the US, but bad for an oil exporter like the Soviet Union. (Oil prices continued to stay low, reaching an all-time annual low of less than $12/barrel in 1998 – in inflation-adjusted terms lower than at any time since World War II. Indeed, the poor performance of the US economy in the mid/late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s can be attributed largely to high oil prices, while the strong economy during the late ‘80’s and throughout the ‘90’s can be attributed, to a significant degree, to the collapse in oil prices.)<br /><br />Oh, and it is probably worth noting that the Berlin Wall actually came down in November of 1989, ten months into the administration of George H.W. Bush, not under Reagan. The final collapse of the Soviet Union followed two years later, in 1991.<br /><br />But Reagan was the rooster crowing just before dawn. Next time someone claims he caused the sun to rise, just ask, “How?”<br /><br />(In fairness, I will give Reagan credit for recognizing Gorbachev as a true partner for peace and, against the strident objections of his wingnut advisors, agreeing with Gorbachev to big reductions in the nuclear arsenals of both countries. Much to the consternation of those advisors, Reagan even </span><a href="http://www.2020visioncampaign.org/pages/143/Mikhail_Gorbachev_calls_for_elimination_nuclear_weapons_as_soon_as_possible"><span style="font-family:arial;">agreed with Gorbachev</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> at Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986 on the ultimate goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons. This is a goal that </span><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/18/794610/-They-are-saluting-his-commitment-to-disarmament"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama has revived</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. But those were actions that, if anything, would have <em><strong>helped</strong></em> the Soviet economy not undermined it.)<br /><br />Another claim I have been hearing a lot lately is that Reagan cut government spending. Unlike the causes of the end of the Cold War, this one is easy to dispel and the proof is objective and indisputable.<br /><br />Federal spending as a % of GDP was higher under Reagan than under any president in US history before or since (other than four years during WWII). Here are the </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">numbers</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br />1980 21.7<br />1981 22.2<br />1982 23.1<br />1983 23.5<br />1984 22.2<br />1985 22.9<br />1986 22.4<br />1987 21.6<br />1988 21.3<br />1989 21.2<br /><br />[Note: I would attribute fiscal years 1980 and 1981 to Carter – I include them here just for comparison to the years that follow. The federal government’s fiscal year begins October 1, so by the time a new president is sworn in we are almost four months into that fiscal year. Given that there are lags in economic performance, and it takes a new president time to enact new policies, I credit that year to the previous president. For example, in the first three months of the fiscal year that just ended, the federal debt increased by over $500 billion – putting us on course for an annual deficit of over two trillion dollars. That was before Obama took office. This is not a perfect methodology but it is probably better than giving the incoming president credit or blame for the first partial year of his administration. In any event, it doesn’t change any of my basic points.]<br /><br />(Spending stayed at about the about the same level during the administration of the first Bush, coming in at 21.4% of GDP in 1993. By the end of Clinton’s eight years, however, it had been reduced to 18.5% of GDP in 2001.)<br /><br />Along the way Reagan also increased federal civilian employment by 60,000 (it declined by more than 400,000 under Clinton). And he created a new cabinet agency (the Department of Veteran Affairs).<br /><br />Of course, as we all know, Reagan also cut taxes. What do you think happens when you increase spending and cut taxes? From the time of Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 until Clinton and a Democratic Congress raised them in 1993, </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/hist.pdf"><span style="font-family:arial;">federal debt increased more than four fold</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> – from under a trillion dollars in 1981 to over $4 trillion by the end of 1992. (Under George W. Bush, it </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt"><span style="font-family:arial;">almost doubled again</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, increasing by over $5 trillion, from $5.6 trillion in January, 2001 to $10.7 trillion in December, 2008. As a percentage of GDP it went from 54% to 75% under Bush. And that’s not even counting the trillion dollar structural budget deficits he left behind.)<br /><br />For those who think that President Obama’s campaign proposal to raise the tax on capital gains from 15% to 20% is “socialism” and will destroy the economy, please take note that Ronaldus Magnus raised the capital gains tax from 20% to 28% in 1986. And the economy did just fine over the ensuing decade before it was cut to 20% again in 1997. (I should note the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was one of the best pieces of tax legislation in my lifetime. Reagan, to his credit, worked in a bipartisan manner with Senator Bill Bradley and Rep. Dick Gephardt to eliminate almost every loophole in the Internal Revenue Code. It even eliminated the tax preference for capital gains. The result was a much simpler tax code and lower overall rates. Unfortunately, while the structural changes were good, overall rates were left too low to pay the bills, perpetuating Reagan’s massive budget deficits.)<br /><br />Reagan didn’t cut all taxes, however. He signed into law </span><a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/1983amend.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">increases in Social Security taxes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on employees and employers, taking the tax from 7% to 7.65%. And he </span><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett200310290853.asp"><span style="font-family:arial;">increased gas taxes by a nickel a gallon</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, raising an additional $3.3 billion in the first year. But these are taxes that effect working people not the rich.<br /><br />So much for the idea that Reagan cut spending or otherwise was a fiscal conservative. Just more Reagan myths.<br /><br />This post is too long already so I won’t go into any depth on the whole Iran-Contra thing (you can </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair#cite_note-Excerpts_from_Iran-Contra_Report-6"><span style="font-family:arial;">read all the details here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), other than to note that Reagan sold arms to Iran (which was against the law) and used the money to fund terrorists in Central America (which was also against the law). And it wasn’t like this was some kind of rogue operation run out of the CIA or the Pentagon. It was run out of the <em><strong>White House</strong></em>. But the cover up largely worked. Most of the relevant documents (including a presidential covert action finding signed by Reagan authorizing the sale of weapons to Iran) were destroyed. Most of the key players (including Reagan’s secretary of defense and national security advisor) were subsequently pardoned by George H.W. Bush. And some of those convicted of felonies in conjunction with the Iran-Contra affair (like Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter) even turned up later in the administration of George W. Bush. Just one observation: How do think it would have gone over with the wingnuts had it been a Democratic president who illegally sold arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran?<br /><br />A final Reagan myth that we might as well refute is the idea that Reagan was a uniquely popular president. Compared to George W. Bush, sure. But, to quote </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/the-great-taxer.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Paul Krugman</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.</span></blockquote></span>You can’t blame Republicans for wanting to mythologize Reagan. After all, what’s the alternative? Nixon? But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to accept those myths unchallenged.<br /></span><br /><strong>UPDATE:</strong> A good op-ed from the <em>Boston Globe</em>, “<a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/11/05/who_ended_the_cold_war/">Who Ended the Cold War?</a>”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-88589258818691753092009-10-14T13:05:00.000-07:002009-10-14T14:20:23.786-07:00thoughts on the peace prize<span style="font-family:arial;">France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, probably </span><a href="http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Nobel-Peace-Prize-President.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">summed up</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> best the sentiment underlying the unanimous decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"By awarding [President Obama] its most prestigious prize, the Committee … does justice to your vision of tolerance and dialogue between States, cultures and civilizations. Finally, it sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples."<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />America’s return to the heart of all the world’s peoples.<br /><br />It's hard to see how that is a <em><strong>bad</strong></em> thing.<br /><br />German Chancellor Angela Merkel also praised the decision, </span><a href="http://www.thelocal.de/national/20091009-22459.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">saying</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "In a short time [President Obama] has been able to set a new tone throughout the world ..."<br /><br />A new tone. Hard to argue with that.<br /><br />Despite the view on the American right that Europe is some kind of anti-American socialist monolith, Sarkozy and Merkel are both conservative, pro-American leaders. They even supported Bush. (For that matter, two of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are members of the conservative party in that country. But, then, as a German friend of mine used to say, "The US has a conservative party ... and a far right party.") <br /><br />[It's also worth noting that Germany and France have the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Security_Assistance_Force"><span style="font-family:arial;">largest contingents</span></a> <span style="font-family:arial;">of NATO troops in Afghanistan after the US and the UK. Of course, they were mocked by many in this country for not joining Bush's folly in Iraq. "Freedom fries," and all that. As it turned out, it's too bad we didn't heed their advice and focus on stabilizing Afghanistan instead. Sometimes it’s a good idea to listen to your friends. But that is another subject.]<br /><br />More than anything, the award the of the Nobel Peace Prize to a sitting US president is an affirmation that US leadership matters profoundly to the rest of the world. It is a fundamentally "pro-American" gesture. Which is why it was condemned by those who hate America like the </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/taliban-condemns-obamas-n_n_314999.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Taliban</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, </span><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE59A1MU20091011"><span style="font-family:arial;">Hugo Chavez</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, and </span><a href="http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/90677/-hamas-says-obama-does-not-deserve-nobel-peace-prize-.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Hamas</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> -- and the anti-Obama crowd in this country, like hate radio bloviator Rush Limbaugh who </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/limbaugh-on-obama-nobel-p_n_315661.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">acknowledged his alliance of convenience with the enemies of freedom</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: "Now that's hilarious, that I'm on the same side of something that the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban." We are all on the same side as the Taliban? What do you mean "we," paleface? (Hey, Rush -- the Taliban share your views on a lot of things, like feminists and gays, to cite just two examples.)<br /><br />By contrast, those who praised the decision included the likes of previous Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Shimon Peres and Mikhail Gorbachev. Which crowd would you rather associate yourself with?<br /><br />But, then, President Obama was attacked by his domestic critics for telling school kids to work hard and stay in school. As Eugene Robinson </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/10/why_no_kudos_for_obama.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "If Obama were to cure cancer, the blowhards would complain that he’s put thousands of hard-working, red-blooded American oncologists out of work." <br /><br />As E.J. Dionne noted on NPR: <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">There is something kind of rancid about our current politics that you saw here, again, as you saw when there was a certain celebration on the right when Chicago didn't win the Olympics. ... [T]here was just such anger that our president won the Nobel Peace Prize, that's kind of disturbing about the state of politics.<br /></span></blockquote></span><br /></span>(As Dionne <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/10/the_oslo-copenhagen_contradict.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">also noted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "Obama’s critics can’t have it both ways. If it was bad for presidential prestige to lose the Olympics, isn’t it good for presidential prestige to win the Nobel Peace Prize? ... Why isn't that worth celebrating? ... Yet, if Oslo should deflate a lot of the bloviating about Copenhagen, I doubt that Obama’s critics will notice any contradiction. They will just move on smartly to the next attack.")<br /><br />The Republican party didn't waste a moment to turn this honor for our country into a partisan attack. Within minutes of the announcement from Oslo, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele came out with </span><a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/10/09/steele/index.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">this</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the President’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain - President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”<br /></span></blockquote></span><br />I quote Steele only because it allows me to pass along this quip from Pat Buchanan: "Michael Steele had a Kanye West moment, coming out there and saying Beyonce should have gotten the award. He shouldn't have done that." What does it say about the state of politics in this country when Buchanan is a voice of moderation on the right?<br /><br />President Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod made this </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/us/politics/10assess.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">initial observation</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> upon hearing the news: "I’d like to believe that winning the Nobel Peace Prize is not a political liability." Sadly, given the "rancid" state of American politics, it probably is the case that the Nobel Committee did President Obama no favor by awarding him this prize. But I think President Obama will survive this setback as he has others.<br /><br />It's a perfectly reasonable view to state that the award was premature. President Obama is fairly new on the scene and presumably (cross your fingers) has a long time remaining on the political stage. We can only hope that his best work is still ahead of him. But it is also reasonable to note that the Nobel Peace Prize is not given posthumously. Which means it is often given long before the recipient's life work is done and before history has rendered a verdict on the success of those efforts.<br /><br />[It's worth noting that despite all the chatter about the 205 nominations for the Peace Prize having been made back in February, when President Obama had only been in office for a couple of weeks, the decision of the Nobel Committee was not made until last Monday.]<br /><br />President Obama </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Winning-the-Nobel-Peace-Prize/"><span style="font-family:arial;">correctly noted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, "[T]hroughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes." <br /><br />In some cases, it has gone to honor specific achievements, like Jimmy Carter brokering the Camp David accords between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor, Egypt, which has resulted in a peace between those two former enemies that has endured for over 30 years. But in other cases it has been used to give momentum to a cause. Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, but the brutal military dictatorship she has resisted continues to rule Burma. What has she "accomplished"? Archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 -- ten years before the apartheid regime in South Africa fell. Was it "premature" then? Or in 1993 when it was awarded to Nelson Mandela for the same cause? Shirin Edabi received it in 2003 for promoting democracy and human rights in Iran -- how has that been going lately? And last time I checked the Dalai Lama hadn't succeeded in securing the freedom or cultural autonomy of the Tibetan people. But he gives inspiring speeches. <br /><br />Which is the point. The path to peace lies in the hearts of people. (Our friend, Mickey Lemle, who made the excellent documentary </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Exile-Dalai-Lama/dp/B000CQNJ0K"><span style="font-family:arial;">Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, tells a story of His Holiness advising him not to go to an anti-war demonstration if he had anger in his heart. "Be the change you seek in the world," as Gandhi said.) Changing peoples' hearts <em><strong>is</strong></em> an accomplishment. <br /><br />As far as I'm concerned, President Obama's speech in Cairo in June alone fully justifies the Nobel Peace Prize. (If you never saw it, it is still worth doing so. </span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-in-cairo.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">You can watch it here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.) Given the increasingly violent "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, a US president traveling to the largest Arab city to deliver an eloquent message of peace is a remarkable event. (If only that had been done in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 -- instead talk of a "crusade" and Manichean macho swagger like "either you are with us or you are with the enemy" and "God is not neutral.")<br /><br />Those who say President Obama got the Peace Prize for being "not Bush" have half a point. The magnitude of the change President Obama represents is defined by the starting point. It is fair to say this is as much a prize given to American voters for choosing a change of course as it is to President Obama for leading that change of course. It is not a good thing when the world's sole superpower becomes a force of destabilization and in some ways even lawlessness. No one would be celebrating the end of torture and secret prisons if those things never existed in the first place.<br /><br />Of course, those who want us to start yet another war, with Iran, when we are overextended in two wars already aren't going to like a message of peace. (Remember this one? “</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421ta_talk_remnick"><span style="font-family:arial;">Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.”) And the Chinese were pretty unhappy about the Dalia Lama getting the Nobel Peace Prize.<br /><br />As Steve Benen </span><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_10/020349.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the <em>Washington Monthly</em>:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">For all the recognition of George W. Bush's unpopularity, it's easy to overlook the ways in which the international community was truly mortified by the U.S. leadership during the Bush era. The irreplaceable leading nation could no longer be trusted to do the right thing -- on use of force, torture, rule of law, international cooperation, democratic norms, even climate change. We'd reached a point at which much of the world was poised to simply give up on America's role as a global leader.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">And, love him or hate him, President Obama changed this. I doubt anyone on the Nobel committee would admit it, but the Peace Prize is, to a certain extent, an implicit "thank you" to the United States for reclaiming its rightful place on the global stage. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">It's indicative of a degree of relief. Much of the world has wanted America to take<br />the lead again, and they're rightly encouraged to see the U.S. president stepping up in the ways they hoped he would. It's hard to overstate the significance, for example, of seeing a U.S. president chair a meeting of the United Nations Security Council and making strides on a nuclear deal.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">This is not to say Obama was honored simply because he's not Bush. The president really has committed himself to promoting counter-proliferation, reversing policies on torture, embracing a new approach to international engagement, and recommitting the U.S. to the Middle East peace process. But charting a new course for American leadership, breaking with the recent past, no doubt played a<br />role.</p></span></blockquote></span>For many of President Obama's critics, it isn't so much that he hasn't done anything as it is that they don't like the things he is doing.<br /><br />The Nobel Committee's </span><a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">statement</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> read, in part:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.</span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values<br />and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.</p></span></blockquote></span>I don't think it is unfair to say that many of President Obama's critics don't like exactly those things the Nobel Committee cited in giving him the prize. For them, world opinion is something to distain not cultivate. <br /><br />(To take just </span><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-07-07-foreign-usat_x.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">one example</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, when the US Supreme Court banned executions of mentally retarded convicts Justice Stevens cited foreign law in a footnote noting that "within the world community, the ... death penalty for crimes committed by mentally retarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved." Right-wingers went nuts. <strong><em>Over a footnote.</em></strong> In a scathing dissent, Justice Scalia called it "dangerous dicta" since "this court should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans". In her confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor was </span><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/51293/gopers-hit-sotomayor-on-foreign-law"><span style="font-family:arial;">attacked</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for saying that while "[f]oreign law cannot be used as a holding or a precedent or to bind an outcome of a legal decision interpreting the constitution," American judges should not "close their minds to some good ideas".)<br /><br />It might be worth recalling in this context the preface of the </span><a href="http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;">Declaration of Independence</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> which asserts that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires" that its signatories explain themselves. Talk about "dangerous dicta." Why should we care what the rest of the world thinks?<br /><br />I agree with the State Department official who </span><a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/09/state-dept-on-nobel-better-to-be-thrown-acolades-than-shoes/%20"><span style="font-family:arial;">quipped</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">: "Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum -- when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes."<br /><br />When the pro-American conservative Sarkozy was elected president of France in 2007, Condoleeza Rice asked him what she could do to help him. "Improve your image in the world," he told her.<br /><br />Coincidentally, last week, prior to the Nobel announcement, the results of the annual </span><a href="http://www.gfk.com/group/press_information/press_releases/004734/index.en.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> were announced. That index measures the global image of 50 countries. NBI founder, Simon Anholt said:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">"What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States in 2009. Despite recent economic turmoil, the U.S. actually gained significant ground. The results suggest that the new U.S. administration has been well received abroad and the American electorate’s decision to vote in President Obama has given the United States the status of the world’s most admired country.”<br /></span></blockquote></span><br /></span>Between 2008 and 2009, the US went from seventh to first. As another NBI official noted: "While most nations’ reputation does not undergo major change from year to year, the U.S. has clearly bucked the trend." <br /><br />Most of the things we seek to accomplish in the world are not achieved through force or the threat of force. Mililtary might can command respect or acquiescence. But it can also engender hatred and resistance. In most of our dealings with the world it is more or less irrelevant. It is our moral leadership that is the source of our greatest power.<br /><br />Most Americans, I hope, believe it is a good thing that our president received one of the world's highest honors. If the world is expressing optimism over our leadership, maybe we should, too.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-23845814420743677952009-10-09T20:25:00.000-07:002009-10-09T21:38:03.632-07:00the obama nobel peace prize<span style="font-family:arial;">What passes for a political “dialogue” in this country has become so distorted by what </span><a href="http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/10/nobel-committee-gives-gift-to-movement-conservatives-fox-news/"><span style="font-family:arial;">one wag</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> has described as the “over-the-top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert-hysteria” of the right, that I have found myself increasingly just checking out. But President Obama keeps reminding me of our better nature. I was as surprised as anyone by the announcement today that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I thought it worth taking the time to compose an essay on the subject, and I probably will still do so. But </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#33249779"><span style="font-family:arial;">this piece by Rachel Maddow</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> does about as good a job of it as I could hope to:<br /><br /><div><iframe src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/33249779#33249779" frameborder="0" width="425" scrolling="no" height="339"></iframe></div><div><p style="MARGIN-TOP: 5px; FONT-SIZE: 11px; BACKGROUND: none transparent scroll repeat 0% 0%; WIDTH: 425px; COLOR: #999; FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; TEXT-ALIGN: center">Visit msnbc.com for <a style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal! important; COLOR: #5799db! important; BORDER-BOTTOM: #999 1px dotted; HEIGHT: 13px; TEXT-DECORATION: none! important" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/">Breaking News</a>, <a style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal! important; COLOR: #5799db! important; BORDER-BOTTOM: #999 1px dotted; HEIGHT: 13px; TEXT-DECORATION: none! important" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507">World News</a>, and <a style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal! important; COLOR: #5799db! important; BORDER-BOTTOM: #999 1px dotted; HEIGHT: 13px; TEXT-DECORATION: none! important" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072">News about the Economy</a></p></div><div><strong>Correction:</strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div></div><div>When I dashed off this post I picked up the phrase, “the ‘over-the-top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert-hysteria’ of the right” because it had a nice ring to it. But I didn’t give it sufficient thought. As the father of two pre-tween daughters who have just discovered Beatlemania (we watched “Help” tonight), I realized upon reflection that “over-the-top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert-hysteria” is something spontaneous, fun and harmless. It’s a beautiful, innocent, joyful thing, like … a dog chasing a Frisbee. Or something. The hysteria of the right, by contrast, is calculating, cynical and hateful. It was a totally inappropriate metaphor. I apologize to tween girls.</div><div><br /></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-81624238922379893572009-09-18T08:31:00.000-07:002009-09-18T08:41:19.588-07:00snl on wilson<span style="font-family:arial;">Last night NBC debuted a half-hour Thursday night version of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. The opening sketch was a great take on last week's "You lie!" outburst by Rep. Addison Graves(yet another right-wing hero not really named "Joe") Wilson Sr. Check out the first five minutes of this clip:</span><br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4ab3a471578e0eea/4ab37eec879c353b/2a06a36/-cpid/c5be4c9cc88316eb" id="W4727a250e66f97234ab3a471578e0eea" width="384" height="283"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4ab3a471578e0eea/4ab37eec879c353b/2a06a36/-cpid/c5be4c9cc88316eb" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-28710282456987267932009-09-14T12:06:00.000-07:002009-09-15T12:04:22.497-07:00on the anniversay of 9-11<span style="font-family:arial;">[I meant to write this on Friday – the eighth anniversary of the attacks of 9-11 – but I got distracted by the whole Joe Wilson matter. And it was 87 degrees in Seattle so I didn’t really feel like sitting around writing. The glorious weather continued through the weekend, and when you live on a houseboat in Seattle you don’t take good weather for granted. So I have lost a bit of the timeliness of my theme. But better that than having it go the way of most of my thoughts – transitory and undocumented.]<br /><br />It is worth recalling the anniversary of 9-11 if for no other reason than to contrast it with the national mood today.<br /><br />Those attacks brought the nation together. Despite the fact that Bush didn’t do much of anything immediately in response – other than to fly around the country on Air Force One trying to evade would-be attackers – his approval rate among the American people jumped to 90%. In contrast with President Obama, who won the presidency decisively, Bush had lost the popular vote by 500,000 votes and only squeaked through with an Electoral College win thanks to a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote (in the worst Supreme Court decision in my lifetime). If any president deserved to be treated as illegitimate, it was Bush. But the country supported him because the attacks of 9-11 reminded us that we are all, in fact, Americans. Not just autonomous individual consumption machines – but part of a larger collective. A community. A nation. And, for better or worse (worse, as it turned out), President Bush was the country’s leader.<br /><br />Flags sprouted everywhere. As if the National Anthem wasn’t enough, “God Bless America” was added to the displays of patriotism at the beginning of sporting events.<br /><br />Red state Americans even embraced New York City – previously viewed by many as a den of iniquity inhabited by liberals and scary brown people – as the spiritual focus of this new national unity. The Congressional vote on the Authorization For The Use of Force in Afghanistan (</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists#House_of_Representatives"><span style="font-family:arial;">420 to 1 in the House</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists#Senate"><span style="font-family:arial;">98 to 0 in the Senate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) was only one vote away from being unanimous, and the vote on the “USA PATRIOT Act” (</span><a href="http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll398.xml"><span style="font-family:arial;">357 to 66 in the House</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> and </span><a href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=1&vote=00313"><span style="font-family:arial;">98 to 1 in the Senate</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">) was overwhelming for such a sweeping and controversial piece of legislation. The country, to a degree unseen since World War II, was united.<br /><br />Alas, Bush decided to take the power that a united country gave him and use it for narrow partisan and ideological purposes. Karl Rove even publicly articulated a strategy for the 2002 mid-term elections built on turning national security into a partisan “wedge” issue. It is not unfair to acknowledge that Bush was the first sitting president in the country’s history who actively sought to <em><strong>divide</strong></em> the country during a time of war (actually, two wars, which continue to this day). Incredible. The nation’s leader at a time of war actively seeking to divide the country for partisan gain. For that alone, Bush will almost certainly go down as the worst president in history.<br /><br />Those attempts to divide the country succeeded. Many of the most ardent “patriots” in the aftermath of 9-11 are today, against all rationality, insisting that our democratically-elected leader is not even an American. They are taking guns to public meetings held by our elected officials and even by our president. They are equating our government to the worst regimes in the history of mankind. Even some governors are talking nonsense about “secession.” (I’ve been taking to quoting Gail Collins a lot lately. I loved her </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/opinion/12collins.html?_r=1"><span style="font-family:arial;">line last week</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that, “there are some patriots who love the country so much that they would like to see their state secede from the union.”) Every day, it seems, new lows of incivility and outright craziness are reached. It is hard to attribute that to the prospect of extending health insurance to most of those Americans who currently lack it. Rather, I fear it is a new tribalism based on political party, ideology, and even race. Instead of a nation “indivisible” we are at risk of becoming a collection of warring tribes.<br /><br />I attribute much of this to an anti-government ideology that has gripped the country for the past 30 years, metastasizing like a cancer. Government has its limitations and potential dangers. We need to guard against its excesses just as we need to be cognizant of the limitations and potential excesses of the market and concentrated corporate power. Neither government nor the market are inherently good or evil. They are both means not ends. Like any instrument of humanity, they can be used for either good or evil. But this notion that the government of the United States of America is our enemy is unhealthy and destructive. <strong>I fear it has increasingly undermined our ability as a society to achieve great or even basic, necessary things.<br /></strong><br />A Republican friend recently sent me a collection of anti-government quotations from Ronald Reagan with the subject line of the email, “Do you miss this guy?” (with the implication being that we should). There was a time (maybe while reading Ayn Rand as a college sophomore) when those quotations might have seemed wise or at least amusing. Now I find them … well, sophomoric.<br /><br />And, then, there was the definitive anti-government quote from Reagan:<br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">‘Government is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem.’</span></blockquote></span>Well, Reagan may have thought that government was <em><strong>the</strong></em> problem, but a year ago when the global financial system was melting down, it was the <em><strong>only</strong></em> solution. Ignoring the lessons learned during the Great Depression and dismantling financial regulation to free the “animal spirits” of Wall Street didn’t work out too well.<br /><br />Eight years ago, we were all proud to be Americans. Our neighbors were our fellow country men and women. Today, right-wingers profess their hatred of our government. But it was that government that won World War II and the Cold War. It was our government that built the interstate highway system and the Internet. It was our government that harnessed the power of the atom and put a man on the moon. It was our government that brought about rural electrification and built the Western water projects that made it possible for millions of people to live in deserts like Southern California, Nevada and Arizona. It was our government that created the first national parks (the subject of a </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/arts/television/13jens.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">new 12-hour Ken Burn series</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), setting aside special places like Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon for future generations to enjoy (and those were controversial decisions at the time, as “conservatives” thought the government had no business putting such places off limits to exploitation – the <em>Seattle Times</em> recently had a good column on the </span><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2009814309_danny06.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">bitter fight to create Mount Rainier National Park</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">).<br /><br />It was the GI Bill after World War II that sent a generation to college and allowed them to own their own homes and laid the foundation for the post-War prosperity and the creation of a broad middle class.<br /><br />And, yes, our government enacted revolutionary social policies like universal public education, the 40 hour work week, repeal of child labor, the minimum wage, Social Security, and Medicare (the latter two allowing Americans to grow old without fear of living in abject poverty with no health care). We also gave women the vote and passed laws making it illegal to discriminate against minority groups and women. The Civil Rights laws had to be enforced by the Federal Government against states that had institutionalized racial discrimination. (The result, as we know, is that the Southern states went from being solidly Democratic to being solidly Republican because many citizens of those states resented – and to this day still resent – the federal government forcing them to stop their apartheid policies.) We also passed laws to clean up our air and water – something “free markets” left to themselves can’t do because individual and corporate polluters don’t bear most of the costs of their polluting activities. (Yesterday’s <em>New York Times</em> had an </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">epic piece of journalism</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on the degradation of our nation’s drinking water and the lack of enforcement of our clean water laws over recent years.) All these things were opposed by anti-government “conservatives” at the time. Yet most Americans couldn’t imagine going back to the way it was before these government-led social reforms. (Indeed, much of the focus of anti-government protests this summer was to “keep the government’s hands off our Medicare.” Only in America could the defense of a major government program against any changes become integrated into anti-government ideology.)<br /><br />I am proud of all these things (I’m sure you could think of a lot more). The “government” of the United States of America is not my enemy. The anti-government ideology that has taken root over the past 30 years is the source of much of the cynicism and hostility toward our government that has made it almost impossible for us to collectively tackle big problems – like extending health insurance to the tens of millions of Americans who currently lack it. Imagine someone proposing the interstate highway system today. (A comparable contemporary equivalent might be a massive effort to wean ourselves from carbon-based fuels in favor of renewable sources of energy. Or even something more modest like a national system of high-speed rail. This is hardly cutting-edge stuff. Japan built the first “bullet trains” in the 1960’s. Even Spain now has </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/02/spain.railtravel"><span style="font-family:arial;">trains that can run at over 220 miles per hour</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> as part of what will become a network of 10,000 miles of high-speed rail lines. But we have our anti-government ideology and a lot of worthless mortgage-backed securities.)<br /><br />This anti-government ideology may have reached its most extreme manifestation four years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those images of New Orleans are what it looks like to be “on your own” with an anti-government crony in charge of disaster relief.<br /><br />Imagine proposing universal public education today (one of the best bits of </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/09/obama-health-care-speech_n_281265.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama’s speech on health care</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> last week was his defense of a “public option” for health insurance by citing the fact that “public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities”). There is no way you could enact Social Security or Medicare in today’s ideological environment.<br /><br />I recently saw a Vietnam vet wearing a t-shirt with an eagle and a flag that said, “Freedom Isn’t Free.” I thought that would make a great bumper sticker with the addition of the phrase, “That’s why we have to pay taxes.” Whenever I receive an email urging us to honor the sacrifices of our service men and women I’m tempted to reply, “That’s why not whining about paying your taxes is, literally, the least you can do.”<br /><br />On the anniversary of 9-11 it is worth recalling that the firefighters and police officers we celebrated as heroes as were government workers (and unionized government workers at that). The victims of the Pentagon attack we mourned were “federal government bureaucrats”. And when we pledged allegiance to the flag it was to “the Republic for which it stands.”<br /><br />There are a lot of important things that we can’t accomplish solely by us all acting on our own as autonomous, selfish little consumers. President Obama has inherited huge problems. Not everything he does will work out well. But that is true of all human endeavor. Growth and change are what makes a person, an organization or a country strong. The government of the United States of America is our government. It is a means for accomplishing a lot of things that couldn’t be accomplished any other way. If we are blinded by ideology to its potential, we sacrifice much of our potential as a community and, yes, even as individuals.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1974893846640978769.post-36857449060664528972009-09-11T17:04:00.001-07:002009-09-11T17:19:25.845-07:00lies (and the lying liars who tell them)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikAs_1TwcxaVcto5OZvAJFTCSFBKAgq2xx1I1UYXqYoIyc_Qt4XUoADXAQK_mqiPkZdaPnXMjowodnnQkNZhJCjlsJt8hsvQl7lTkZDEjpBvns6kU-8BsSXWAmcLoMjFWWgbzmr-JUD_4/s1600-h/adults+are+talking.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380365229651207106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 286px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikAs_1TwcxaVcto5OZvAJFTCSFBKAgq2xx1I1UYXqYoIyc_Qt4XUoADXAQK_mqiPkZdaPnXMjowodnnQkNZhJCjlsJt8hsvQl7lTkZDEjpBvns6kU-8BsSXWAmcLoMjFWWgbzmr-JUD_4/s400/adults+are+talking.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">President Obama gave a brilliant speech Wednesday night. If you didn’t watch it, do so (you can </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/09/obama-health-care-speech_n_281265.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">watch the video here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">). And it appears to have had a significant impact on public support for health care reform. According to a </span><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/11/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5302288.shtml?tag=stack"><span style="font-family:arial;">CBS poll released today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, support for President Obama’s approach to health care reform has gone from a net -7 (40/47) to a net + 14 (52/38). That’s an impressive move in the numbers. And it was deserved.<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbMum77DbMwIkzVzZDiR0YX7a2iZYYsCfObutM3CsqTV-89lC4F_bzMBli9W71DHTCPBr9kJPwIl9I8ABDA9rKqVJ-C5LdIrjqVVNnSDrrLAwVOEb14vpR-KVc4B9rOq0KuGCOG9DTkY/s1600-h/health+care+poll.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380365570362904834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 260px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 340px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbMum77DbMwIkzVzZDiR0YX7a2iZYYsCfObutM3CsqTV-89lC4F_bzMBli9W71DHTCPBr9kJPwIl9I8ABDA9rKqVJ-C5LdIrjqVVNnSDrrLAwVOEb14vpR-KVc4B9rOq0KuGCOG9DTkY/s400/health+care+poll.gif" border="0" /></a><br />I suspect a big part of the reason for the move in the poll numbers was President Obama’s forceful refutation of some of the more spectacular right-wing lies about what he is, in fact, proposing. It is not a “government takeover of health care.” It would not mandate end-of-life counseling or create “death panels” that would pull the plug on granny. And it would not extent government subsidized health care to illegal immigrants.<br /><br />As everyone in the world now knows, it was while President Obama was making the latter point that one particularly boorish Republican member of Congress heckled the president like some teabagger at a Town Hall freak show. As Gail Collins </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10collins.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">noted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, “Let me go out on a limb and say that it is not a good plan to heckle the president of the United States when he’s making a speech about replacing acrimony with civility.”<br /><br />Joe Wilson’s antics were only the most egregious display of disrespect toward the President of the United States Wednesday night. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor typed away on his Blackberry while the Commander-in-Chief spoke to Congress. Other Republicans held up hand-lettered signs or waved copies of something or other. All-in-all, you would be hard-pressed to find a more dyspeptic group of old white men. The school children listening to President Obama’s </span><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_school_speech"><span style="font-family:arial;">education speech on Tuesday</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> were infinitely better behaved.<br /><br />(Andy Borowitz has a </span><a href="http://www.borowitzreport.com/article.aspx?ID=7055"><span style="font-family:arial;">good take</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> on the Wilson incident.)<br /><br />But Wilson broke new ground for rudeness during a joint session of Congress. At least that’s the official word from </span><a href="http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/200909110003"><span style="font-family:arial;">Deputy House Historian Fred Beuttler</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> who said that while it is not uncommon for members of Congress to cheer or jeer during a presidential speech, an individual outburst from a member of Congress is unprecedented. And in calling the president a liar, Wilson also </span><a href="http://www.congressmatters.com/storyonly/2009/9/11/81821/1568"><span style="font-family:arial;">broke House rules</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. (Defenders of Wilson are pointing with approval to the rowdy behavior often displayed in Britain’s House of Commons. But </span><a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/the-british-counterexample.html#more"><span style="font-family:arial;">the one thing you <em><strong>can’t</strong></em> shout at an opponent</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the House of Commons is that he or she is a liar.)<br /><br />This is all part of the current Republican effort to de-legitimize President Obama. As Richard Cohen </span><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/09/racisim_in_the_house_chamber.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">notes</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> in the <em>New York Times</em>:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">[President Obama’s] illegitimacy continues to be questioned by the “birthers,” who insist he is not a native-born American, who demand to see the president’s birth certificate, and then, when they see it, insist it cannot be genuine. Neither evidence nor facts will dissuade them because they are the throes of an irrationality based on bigotry. An American president must be -- ought to be -- white. </span></p><span style="font-family:georgia;">Some of the same ugly feeling was present in the House chamber Wednesday night. … The Party of Rudeness had outdone itself.<br /></p></span></blockquote></span>Is it really too much to suggest that Wilson’s outburst was, at its heart, part of this racist denial of President Obama’s legitimacy? Look at the messenger. Wilson started his political career as an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 as the segregationist party candidate. Wilson later </span><a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/you-lie-not-the-first-time-rep-wilsons-emotions-got-the-best-of-him.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">attacked Thurmond’s illegitimate African-American daughter</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> when it was revealed that she was fathered when Thurmond raped her mother, the Thurmond family’s 16-year old maid. “Sometimes these things just go on,” Wilson said, and it was “unseemly” for Thurmond’s daughter to publicly reveal that fact. Wilson said that Thurmond was his “hero” and it was wrong to “diminish” his legacy. (Wilson was forced to offer up a faux “apology” for that incident, too.)<br /><br />Need more? Wilson is (or was) also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, </span><a href="http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/obama-heckler-joe-wilson-member-neo"><span style="font-family:arial;">an organization</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> that has been “taken over in the past decade by radical neo-Confederates who favor secession and defend slavery as a benign institution.” And as a state legislator he was one of only seven Republicans to go against his own party and </span><a href="http://insidecharmcity.com/2008/01/19/the-confederate-flag-and-the-south-carolina-primary/"><span style="font-family:arial;">vote to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the state capitol</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">:<br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">The flag came down that year after Republicans in both houses went for a compromise that would put it on Statehouse grounds at the Confederate Soldier’s monument. <strong>The “Magnificent Seven” of Senators who voted to keep the flag up included current Congressman Joe Wilson</strong> …<br /></span></blockquote></span>It’s not like Wilson is some sort of aberration in his party. Incredibly, the previously little-known member of Congress that Republicans chose to deliver their response to President Obama Wednesday night, Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, is himself a “Birther” who has asserted that “</span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/09/gop-picks-birther-to-rebu_n_279952.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">there are questions</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” about President Obama’s country of birth. (Ironically, Boustany was also a co-sponsor of the “</span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/08/boustany-boehner/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Life Sustaining Treatment Preferences Act of 2009</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” which would mandate that Medicare reimburse the cost of end-of-life counseling -- the so-called "death panels.") But Boustany’s “Birther” views are probably pretty mainstream in Louisiana where, as I noted before (“</span><a href="http://daggatt.blogspot.com/2009/08/serious-bad-craziness.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">serious bad craziness</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">”), only 14% of whites voted for President Obama. (The <em>New York Times</em> has an </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/us/11vitter.html?hpw"><span style="font-family:arial;">article today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> about how the unpopularity of President Obama among whites in Louisiana has revived the re-election prospects of “family-values” Republican Senator “Diaper Dave” Vitter, who was identified as a client of a Washington prostitution ring with a fetish for … shall we say, “being Pampered.”) Boustany, a doctor, was also sued for malpractice eight times and, in a </span><a href="http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/did-you-wonder-why-boustany-gave-repu"><span style="font-family:arial;">bizarre twist</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, attempted to buy a “Lordship Title” from British scam artists. Is Boustany really the best representative of the party Republicans could come up with?<br /><br />In all the media frenzy over Wilson’s boorish behavior, there has been almost no commentary on the <em><strong>substance</strong></em> of his accusation. As is typical with the mainstream media, the coverage was almost entirely about the “controversy” over Wilson’s antics with the underlying substance of the matter ignored as irrelevant (or treated in a “he said/she said” manner as if there was legitimately “two sides” to the matter). But as </span><a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/seven-falsehoods-about-health-care/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Factcheck.org</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, </span><a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/"><span style="font-family:arial;">Politifact</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, </span><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200909110013"><span style="font-family:arial;">Media Matters</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, and others have noted, it was Wilson himself who was lying when he accused President Obama of lying on the subject of whether health care reform would extend government subsidized health care to illegal immigrants. While there is, as yet, no final health care reform bill, the bill that has passed the House Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee is the one that everyone seems to be treating as “the” health care plan (at least for purposes of demonizing it). It </span><a href="http://docs.house.gov/edlabor/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf#page=143"><span style="font-family:arial;">specifically states</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> (in Section 246 on page 143) that no subsidies may go to any immigrant in the country illegally. And there are decent </span><a href="http://www.cleveland.com/medical/index.ssf/2009/08/house_bill_specifically_prohib.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">enforcement mechanisms</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for that (the subsidies take the form of a tax credit which requires the filing of a tax return with a valid Social Security number which is not available to an illegal immigrant).<br /><br />When not talking to their crazy base but actually pressed by the mainstream media, Republicans spouting the illegal immigrants lie resort to defending their claim by saying that there is nothing in current bills that would prevent illegal immigrants from using their own money to buy unsubsidized health insurance on the proposed “exchanges.” Well, uh, OK. So? That is not “providing government health care to illegal immigrants” or any of the other nonsense that is being propagated by Republicans. According to the </span><a href="http://factcheck.org/2009/07/misleading-gop-health-care-claims/"><span style="font-family:arial;">nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, half of all illegal immigrants currently have private health insurance. It’s a <em><strong>good </strong></em>thing that they are buying health insurance with their own money. Is it better that they end up in emergency rooms as public wards? The claim that this consists of government health care is like saying the auto bailout amounts to the government giving cars to illegal immigrants because nothing in the bailout outlaws illegal immigrants buying cars. (Come to think of it, the auto claim would have <em><strong>more</strong></em> validity than the health care claim because autos made by GM and Chrysler are arguably subsidized, unlike health insurance that an illegal immigrant might purchase on an exchange. And anyone in the world is free to by an auto made GM or Chrysler. Therefore it is a subsidy to illegal immigrants.)<br /><br />This lie about health reform extending subsidized coverage to illegal immigrants is official Republican party-line doctrine, being repeated even by supposed “moderates” like Chuck Grassley, who is part of the “Gang of Six” on the Senate Finance Committee that has kept legislation bottled up for months. </span><a href="http://mediamattersaction.org/factcheck/200908130004"><span style="font-family:arial;">Grassley said</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, “The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund health care subsidies for illegal immigrants.” (The “moderate” Grassley also piled on to the “Obama is going to kill granny” lie, saying, “<strong>You have every right to fear</strong>. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. You should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” But, like Boustany, Grassley </span><a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/08/13/oh-those-death-panels/"><span style="font-family:arial;">previously voted</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to extend Medicare funding to “counseling … with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and … advanced care planning.” In other words, Grassley was “for Death Panels before he was against them.”)<br /><br />[There seems to be some kind of crazy contest going on within the Republican Party today. Senator Inhofe today </span><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/58545/inhofe-its-not-worth-suing-obama-for-his-birth-certificate-because-it-would-take-ten-years-to-get-a-decision"><span style="font-family:arial;">joined the ranks of the Birthers</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. And “moderate” Minnesota Governor Pawlenty </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27023.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">seems to be embracing</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> the old Confederate concept of “</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis"><span style="font-family:arial;">nullification</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">” whereby a state can choose to defy federal law. This was, of course, in the context of health care reform. In fairness, Pawlenty didn’t go as far as Texas Governor Rick Perry who </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/gov-rick-perry-texas-coul_n_187490.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">suggested</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> he might support his state seceding from the Union. But he is prepared to fight for the right to deny health care to uninsured Americans.]<br /><br />And you wonder why “bipartisanship” is going nowhere. It’s pretty hard to “compromise” when it comes to outright lies. Does anyone really believe President Obama will garner Republican support by meeting them half way and going just “half crazy”?<br /><br />Even giving an inspirational talk to America’s school children is seen by the right as evidence of Obama’s totalitarian aspirations. The “fair and balanced” </span><a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200909040005"><span style="font-family:arial;">FOX News talking heads</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> called President Obama’s speech to school children “indoctrination” (host Sean Hannity) and the “type of thing [they do] in North Korea and the former Soviet Union ... very cultish” (regular commentator Andrea Tantaros) and compared him to “Chairman Mao” (regular commentator Monica Crowley) and Mussolini (host Glenn Beck). According to Laura Ingraham (substituting for Bill O’Reilly) this is something “</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd3HITB2B-Y"><span style="font-family:arial;">no other president has done</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">.”<br /><br />Never mind that Reagan gave a nationally broadcast speech to schoolchildren where he spewed his anti-government ideology (you can </span><a href="http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002107/"><span style="font-family:arial;">see a video clip here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">), including </span><a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909030020"><span style="font-family:arial;">this ideological nonsense</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> about lower tax rates resulting in higher revenue: <span style="font-family:georgia;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:georgia;">Because you see, the taxes can be such a penalty on people that there's no incentive for them to prosper and to earn more and so forth because they have to give so much to the government. And what we have found is that at the lower rates the government gets more revenue, there are more people paying taxes because there are more people with jobs and there are more people willing to earn more money because they get to keep a bigger share of it, so today, we're getting more revenue at the lower rates than we were at the higher.<br /></span></blockquote></span>(In fact, between the time Reagan cut taxes and Clinton raised them again in 1993, the federal debt more than quadrupled from less than a trillion dollars to four trillion dollars. Quadrupled. By the time Reagan was preaching this anti-government propaganda to schoolchildren in 1988 he had already almost tripled the national debt.)<br /><br />Give President Obama credit for another first: The first black man to be attacked for urging children to work hard and stay in school. It </span><a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/times_change_1.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">didn’t take long</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> for Republicans to go from, “If you criticize the president you are a traitor,” to “School children shouldn’t be allowed to listen to the President of the United States of America.” Wasn’t it just last year Republicans were taking the position that the President could unilaterally disregard laws against torture and the right of Habeas Corpus enshrined in the Constitution as long as he claimed to be doing so in his capacity as commander in chief?<br /><br />Not surprisingly, Wilson has become a hero of the right. Republican ideological overlord Rush Limbaugh has said </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0909/Limbaugh_wishes_Wilson_hadnt_apologized.html?showall"><span style="font-family:arial;">he wished Wilson had not apologized</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. But it’s OK – apparently Wilson didn’t really mean it. He is out today with an </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27025.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">unrepentant fundraising appeal</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">, saying “I will not be muzzled. I will speak up loudly against this risky plan. … The supporters of the government takeover of health care and the liberals who want to give health care to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan. They want to silence anyone who speaks out against it. They made it clear they want to defeat me and pass the plan.”<br /><br />I have joined over 25,000 fellow Americans who have in the past 36 hours </span><a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/wilson-opponent-rob-miller-raises-1-million-since-you-lie-incident.php"><span style="font-family:arial;">donated a total of over $1,000,000</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> to Wilson’s Democratic opponent, Rob Miller, a retired Marine and Iraq war veteran. That’s more than the $600,000 Miller raised in the entire 2008 campaign cycle when he lost to Wilson 54 to 46 despite being outspent by 2 to 1. And there is a </span><a href="http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2009/09/wilson-in-trouble.html"><span style="font-family:arial;">PPP poll out today</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"> taken in the aftermath of Wilson’s outburst Wednesday night that shows Miller leading him 44 to 43. (You, too, can donate to Rob Miller </span><a href="http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/19079"><span style="font-family:arial;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;">. Go ahead – even if it is only ten bucks.)<br /><br />Fight crazy. Support the President.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1