Grassley says mobs of Republicans and other anti-Obama voters from last fall showing up to scream and wave nazi signs at health care town halls means Congress shouldn't pass health care reform (Updated below)
Oh well, I had so hoped that our most honorable Republican congresscritters and their rational constituents would contribute something to this important process.
In the meantime, I believe I have uncovered details of the health care reform plan preferred by Republicans and conservative Democrats, which Grassley would like all of us to slow the fuck down and carefully consider, based on his rational discussion with vitriolic mobs at town halls in Iowa, whose candidate in last fall's election lost. And whose party is in severe minority status in both houses of the U.S. Congress.
Anyway, here is the Republican/Blue Dog Health Care Plan:
Republican/Blue Dog Health Care Plan
(insert plan here)
The end
Update: I would be remiss were I to not include what I'm sure you will find to be both a truly earth-shattering and sensible scheme to reform health care offered by one of the Blue Dog's finest, Rep. Gene Taylor--
Taylor has said he opposes the Obama reform plan, primarily because of the expense involved. Taylor is a sponsor of two health care bills, one that would require Medicare to operate at least one drug benefit plan and negotiate prices directly with drug manufacturers, and another bill that would repeal the insurance industry's antitrust exemption.
"I would hope that everyone in this room knows by now that I am not going to vote for the health care plan," Taylor said, eliciting a standing ovation.
----
So, to review, here is a totally important and doable set of plans for providing better health care in America, from a Blue Dog (or someone I imagine to either be a Blue Dog or highly sympathetic to their agenda, such as it is): One fantastic bill would have Medicare provide prescription drug benefits, which it already does. Oh yes, I'm sorry it does have something about negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma. Anybody think that will get serious consideration or that if it did, it would do anything to provide insurance to those who don't have it? No, didn't think so. And another fine piece of legislation would repeal the insurance industry's anti-trust exemption.
What visionary and courageous souls we have in Congress these days.
FAIL
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
What Ever Happened to No Drama Obama?
The Campaign and its promises seems a long time ago. And the famously disciplined candidate and his team even farther away. Then I see the best post ever on the subject here:
Read the whole thing. There's lots of good food for thought there.
see also Marcy Wheeler for a deep throat backgrounder, as it were, on who she thinks the "unnamed official" is and who the stenographer was.
I love Obama, and Gibbs, and most of the rest of the crew but I wish they'd figure out that letting their own team backbite "the left"--by which they obviously mean "the center" of the country, and backstab the President's policies at the same time is a losing strategy. If its Rahm, which I doubt, he should be ordered to STFU and if its Messina, which seems more likely, he should be fired or exiled to a far distant outpost--maybe sent to investigate co-ops in Alaska.
The Campaign and its promises seems a long time ago. And the famously disciplined candidate and his team even farther away. Then I see the best post ever on the subject here:
My question now is why are certain anonymous White House officials trying to undermine the President? I ask this question in all seriousness, because this is exactly what happened in the Clinton fight for health care reform. We would do these terrific, thoughtful, complex policy meetings where we go over various options on the health care bill but make no firm decisions. The next day in the New York Times or The Washington Post, some particularly controversial aspect of the bill would be headlined as in "High-ranking administration officials say Clinton is considering X." It was without question one of the things that eventually killed health care reform.
What I discovered when I worked in the White House was that there were plenty of people who work in that building whose primary loyalty is not to the President but to themselves. They leak things to reporters to cultivate them and make sure they write puff job articles about them. They help certain lobbyists because they might want a job in their firm someday. They empower certain powerful Senators or members of Congress because they are personally close to them, and/or because they might want to get paid big money to lobby them someday soon. Maybe they want to run for office themselves one day, and so they cultivate certain donors.
Read the whole thing. There's lots of good food for thought there.
see also Marcy Wheeler for a deep throat backgrounder, as it were, on who she thinks the "unnamed official" is and who the stenographer was.
I love Obama, and Gibbs, and most of the rest of the crew but I wish they'd figure out that letting their own team backbite "the left"--by which they obviously mean "the center" of the country, and backstab the President's policies at the same time is a losing strategy. If its Rahm, which I doubt, he should be ordered to STFU and if its Messina, which seems more likely, he should be fired or exiled to a far distant outpost--maybe sent to investigate co-ops in Alaska.
In other news, new studies show that smoking may lead to lung cancer
Dems, just now informed they have a caucus of 60* in the U.S. Senate and that the Republican minority--with whom it has been "negotiating"--has no interest in any health reform legislation passing, might just "go it alone" afterall.
And as Steve Benen noted yesterday:
Then, logically, there's simply no need for bipartisan talks. Short of Mitch McConnell hanging a banner outside his door reading, "Please stop trying to reach out to us," I don't think it can get any clearer.
*If and when Ted Kennedy is well-enough and able to participate.
Dems, just now informed they have a caucus of 60* in the U.S. Senate and that the Republican minority--with whom it has been "negotiating"--has no interest in any health reform legislation passing, might just "go it alone" afterall.
And as Steve Benen noted yesterday:
Then, logically, there's simply no need for bipartisan talks. Short of Mitch McConnell hanging a banner outside his door reading, "Please stop trying to reach out to us," I don't think it can get any clearer.
*If and when Ted Kennedy is well-enough and able to participate.
More of this, please (Updated below)
(CNN) -- Most Congress members conducting town hall meetings this month have chosen a noncombative posture to deal with angry participants who disrupt the proceedings. Not Rep. Barney Frank.
At a lively two-hour meeting Tuesday night in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Frank gave as good as he got in confronting opponents of overhauling the nation's health care system.
(snip)
While Frank attempted to respond to all questions, he gave up when one woman compared health care proposals favored by Frank and President Obama to policies of Nazi Germany.
"When you ask me that question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked.
"You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," he said, adding such behavior demonstrated the strength of First Amendment guarantees of what he called "contemptible" free speech.
"Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," Frank said to the woman. "I have no interest in doing it."
(CNN) -- Most Congress members conducting town hall meetings this month have chosen a noncombative posture to deal with angry participants who disrupt the proceedings. Not Rep. Barney Frank.
At a lively two-hour meeting Tuesday night in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Frank gave as good as he got in confronting opponents of overhauling the nation's health care system.
(snip)
While Frank attempted to respond to all questions, he gave up when one woman compared health care proposals favored by Frank and President Obama to policies of Nazi Germany.
"When you ask me that question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked.
"You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," he said, adding such behavior demonstrated the strength of First Amendment guarantees of what he called "contemptible" free speech.
"Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," Frank said to the woman. "I have no interest in doing it."
UPDATE: I see where Frank's response is now being categorized by many of the usual suspects as "lashing out", "mean", etc. If there is even a suggestion that Frank needs to apologize for this, I might find a need to show up at town hall meetings armed myself.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Robert Novak, who died today at the age of 78, was a fairly important figure in the shaping--which is to say, the de-evolution--of American journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. A Washington correspondent while still in his twenties, he rose to the post of chief congressional reporter for the Wall Street Journal when he was thirty. A couple of years after that, an older, more sedate writer, Rowland Evans, pitched him the idea that they should team up to produce a daily syndicated column, with the understanding that Novak would be the principal leg man and that Evans's name would open doors where needed. The Evans-Novak Political Report made Novak famous in political commentary circles and helped make his fortune; it also made his brand of "inside dope" reporting a hot ticket in Washington journalism. "Inside dope" journalism worked like this: if Senator Bucketass felt that he might be feeling a little heat from a union organizer threatening to challenge him for re-election, then one of the Senator's aides would invite Evans or Novak for lunch and mention that it was sure a shame that the union organizer couldn't feed the ducks in the public park near the playground anymore since the police had advised him that they didn't want to catch him offering any more little girls a nickel if they'd pull up their skirt. The next day, the column would cite "unnamed sources in the nation's capitol" who'd been expressing concern that having a likely pedophile like the union organizer running for office tended to cheapen the whole political process. "There are two kinds of people in this town," Novak once said, "sources ... and targets, and you better make up your mind which you are."
Through the sixties and into the seventies, Novak was, at least, generally considered a dependable reporter whose work was worth sifting for the occasional nugget; it wasn't until the late seventies that Washington insiders and journalism junkies began routinely referring to the column as "Errors and No-facts." By then, Novak's and Evans's conservative political bent had begun coloring the content of their work at least as much as their steady need to reward those who leaked to them and to punish those who held out. But by 1980, with the birth of CNN, Novak had also started whoring himself out to the TV cameras, thus absolving himself of any need to do his job adequately in order to maintain his celebrity status. He and Evans even co-starred together for awhile on CNN, where they had their own weekend interview show. But the old-school, socially comfortable Evans had a TV presence like mist on the lens, whereas Novak, with his growly voice and threatening bulk and Blofeld-like features, was a natural for the role of the cartoon conservative meanie. It turned out to be a role he relished; everyone knows that Novak's nickname was the Prince of Darkness, and the reason everyone knows it is that he wielded it proudly as part of his self-promotion toolkit. (He eventually used it as the title of his memoir.) He was one of the first of the new breed of telepundits to understand that the secret to success in the cable news era wasn't how good your reporting was but whether, in a few minutes of TV time, you could flaunt enough attention-getting mannerisms to deserve the seat of honor at a Dean Martin roast. As Novak became more famous across the country, he could command ever higher speaking fees and charge more for his star-studded "retreats", which meant that it was more important to him than ever to keep track of who was doing him favors by agreeing to appear with him at these things, which made his "this guy is great/this one's a scumbag" inside journalism more a matter of rewarding and settling scores than ever.
If, God help you, you accept the kind of media gamesmanship that Novak saw as his calling, then maybe the worst thing you can say about the man is that, towards the end, he failed to prove that he could take it as well as he could dish it out. Having outed the CIA agent Valerie Plame as part of the Bush White House's war on Plame's husband Joseph Wilson--an implicit warning to anyone who'd dare to tell the truth about any aspect of the race to war in Iraq--Novak spent more than a year sneering at the thought that he'd done anything wrong or that he might get into trouble over it. (a little treason among friends was no big whoop as far as Novak was concerned; during the Clinton years, he used Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who was found to be padding his income selling information to Russian intelligence, as a primary source for stories he wrote that smeared Janet Reno.) He didn't get into much trouble over it; for instance, he didn't see the inside of a jail cell, as Judith Miller did, and he seemed to resent it when people drew the only logical inference from this (everyone knew that he was in it up to his eyeballs) and deduced that he must have sang like Caruso to the special prosecutor. More damaging to his image was the incident when he threw a hissy fit and stormed out of a live taping of a CNN show, in what looked a lot like an improvised bailing out of the broadcast ao that he could avoid being asked about his role in l'affaire Plame. A few months later he officially "retired" from CNN after an association of a quarter of a century and then announced that, henceforth, he'd be appearing on Fox News, in part because that channel was more congenial to his politics than CNN, even though he issued a statement stressing that "I was never censored by CNN and I said some fairly outrageous things and some very conservative things. I don't want to give the impression that they were muzzling me and I had to go to a place that wouldn't muzzle me." There is, however, a difference between never being muzzled and never, ever, being challenged in the slightest, and he must have known that he could count on getting the latter kind of treatment from Fox.
It's sort of pathetic when a man whose bread and butter comes from promoting his image as a fearless attack dog makes it plain that he himself can't bear to even have anyone look at him cross-eyed, and Novak, like a lot of the conservatives we've seen lately doing their self-exculpation tours, may have been less secure, and most vulnerable to criticism, than he ever wanted to let on. (His statements from his last years, while he was battling cancer and other various ailments, are full of assurances that all those people he knows are gloating sadistically over his suffering would feel pretty small if they knew how much the people who really matter loved the shit out of him.) But his spirit lives on whenever some Bill O'Reilly type who's never had to work hard a day in his life rages about how he's the last true working-class hero, or whenever some pitiful Tucker Carlson character manages to flaunt his utter cynicism in the most self-righteous tones imaginable.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Two takes on the chances for a "public option": Matt Taibbi & Howard Dean
Matt Taibbi says no:
Me? I'm tired of speculating until at least the recess is over. I think a better use of my time would be searching for adorable kitten videos on YouTube.
[cross-posted at Rumproast]
Matt Taibbi says no:
Now, obviously (and this is will be explored in more detail in the forthcoming piece, which will be out this week), the public option was not a cure-all. In fact, the Democrats had in reality already managed to kill the public option by watering it down to the point of near-meaninglessness. But the notion that our president not only does not have any use anymore for a public option, but in fact “will be satisfied” if there is merely “choice and competition” in the market is, well, disgusting.Howard Dean, earlier on Morning Joe, says yes:
I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
[cross-posted at Rumproast]
Sunday, August 16, 2009
THIS ISN'T GOING TO APPEASE THEM
It's clear right now that the leading Democrats have given up on the public option -- and my question is: So how are the fat cats going to try to kill what's left? Because I simply don't believe the conventional wisdom, which is that that they and their GOP and Blue Dog lackeys will (or may) back down if certain objectionable provisions are pulled from the bill. I think they're going for the kill. I think the rhetoric is going to get wilder, not less heated, as Democrats compromise.
If you doubt that the public option is dead, examine the evidence. Here's a Politico story:
...With August dominated by angry faces and raised voices at town hall meetings, influential Democrats began laying the groundwork for the fall, particularly with the party's liberal base, saying they may need to accept a less-than-perfect bill to achieve health reform this year.
"Trying to hold the president's feet to the fire is fine, but first we have to win the big argument," former President Bill Clinton said Thursday at the Netroots Nation convention...
"I want us to be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf," he said....
Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said twice this week that he was open to dropping the public plan to pass a bill....
White House health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said recently the president was willing to study replacing the government-run plan with non-profit insurance cooperatives....
Writing in a Washington Post op-ed, Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who is close to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, warned progressives against turning their backs on reform if it doesn't include everything they want....
Add that to this:
A key Senate negotiator said Sunday that President Barack Obama should drop his push for a government-funded public health insurance option because the Senate will never pass it.
Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota said it was futile to continue to "chase that rabbit" due to the lack of 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
"The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," Conrad said on "FOX News Sunday."
And this:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ... told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that "what's important is choice and competition." A public option "is not an essential element," the Cabinet secretary said Sunday.
And this:
"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it," Obama said. "And by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else."
But, see, I don't buy this from the Politico story:
On Capitol Hill, the public plan is a huge legislative chess piece that, used strategically, could checkmate opponents. An in-play public option allows Democrats to keep a gun to the head of insurance companies as they work to reform the private insurance market.
If Democrats deal the public plan away too early, it allows industry lobbyists to turn their attention to shaping insurance market reforms, which, next to defeating the public plan, is its most important priority. In fact, health industry insiders acknowledge that they could win the battle but lose the war if they defeat the public plan, but fail to influence the market reforms.
Dropping a public plan means reform is likely to pick up some bipartisan support, particularly from Senate Republicans who staunchly oppose the public option, but have been actively working with Democrats to craft a compromise.
That last sentence is why I don't believe it. Democrats are never going to pick up "bipartisan support." The whole point of the crazy talk up to now has been to make voting against this bill seem sensible to swing voters (plus, obviously, right-wingers) no matter what's left in it -- all of which makes it easier for moderates (and phony moderates) to vote no.
I don't believe lobbyists are twiddling their thumbs, just waiting patiently to learn the fate of the public option before saying, "Gee, do you think we should turn our attention now to shaping insurance market reforms?" I think they're working all fronts, all the time, because they're not sure they can achieve a clean kill.
But I think a kill is the #1 goal. And the way that's being done is not by focusing on what is or isn't in the actual bill. The way that's done is creating a series of myths about the actual bill.
If the public option is dropped, the talk of "socialized medicine" isn't going to go away -- not one iota. But just in case a few moderates actually do start wavering, the crazy recitation of real and alleged provision is just going to get crazier.
I could be wrong. Selling out on one provision after another might get this thing through Congress. Everybody but me seems to think so.
But we'll see, won't we?
(Some links via Steve Benen.)
It's clear right now that the leading Democrats have given up on the public option -- and my question is: So how are the fat cats going to try to kill what's left? Because I simply don't believe the conventional wisdom, which is that that they and their GOP and Blue Dog lackeys will (or may) back down if certain objectionable provisions are pulled from the bill. I think they're going for the kill. I think the rhetoric is going to get wilder, not less heated, as Democrats compromise.
If you doubt that the public option is dead, examine the evidence. Here's a Politico story:
...With August dominated by angry faces and raised voices at town hall meetings, influential Democrats began laying the groundwork for the fall, particularly with the party's liberal base, saying they may need to accept a less-than-perfect bill to achieve health reform this year.
"Trying to hold the president's feet to the fire is fine, but first we have to win the big argument," former President Bill Clinton said Thursday at the Netroots Nation convention...
"I want us to be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf," he said....
Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said twice this week that he was open to dropping the public plan to pass a bill....
White House health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said recently the president was willing to study replacing the government-run plan with non-profit insurance cooperatives....
Writing in a Washington Post op-ed, Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who is close to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, warned progressives against turning their backs on reform if it doesn't include everything they want....
Add that to this:
A key Senate negotiator said Sunday that President Barack Obama should drop his push for a government-funded public health insurance option because the Senate will never pass it.
Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota said it was futile to continue to "chase that rabbit" due to the lack of 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
"The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," Conrad said on "FOX News Sunday."
And this:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ... told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that "what's important is choice and competition." A public option "is not an essential element," the Cabinet secretary said Sunday.
And this:
"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it," Obama said. "And by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else."
But, see, I don't buy this from the Politico story:
On Capitol Hill, the public plan is a huge legislative chess piece that, used strategically, could checkmate opponents. An in-play public option allows Democrats to keep a gun to the head of insurance companies as they work to reform the private insurance market.
If Democrats deal the public plan away too early, it allows industry lobbyists to turn their attention to shaping insurance market reforms, which, next to defeating the public plan, is its most important priority. In fact, health industry insiders acknowledge that they could win the battle but lose the war if they defeat the public plan, but fail to influence the market reforms.
Dropping a public plan means reform is likely to pick up some bipartisan support, particularly from Senate Republicans who staunchly oppose the public option, but have been actively working with Democrats to craft a compromise.
That last sentence is why I don't believe it. Democrats are never going to pick up "bipartisan support." The whole point of the crazy talk up to now has been to make voting against this bill seem sensible to swing voters (plus, obviously, right-wingers) no matter what's left in it -- all of which makes it easier for moderates (and phony moderates) to vote no.
I don't believe lobbyists are twiddling their thumbs, just waiting patiently to learn the fate of the public option before saying, "Gee, do you think we should turn our attention now to shaping insurance market reforms?" I think they're working all fronts, all the time, because they're not sure they can achieve a clean kill.
But I think a kill is the #1 goal. And the way that's being done is not by focusing on what is or isn't in the actual bill. The way that's done is creating a series of myths about the actual bill.
If the public option is dropped, the talk of "socialized medicine" isn't going to go away -- not one iota. But just in case a few moderates actually do start wavering, the crazy recitation of real and alleged provision is just going to get crazier.
I could be wrong. Selling out on one provision after another might get this thing through Congress. Everybody but me seems to think so.
But we'll see, won't we?
(Some links via Steve Benen.)
Saturday, August 15, 2009
SO MUCH FOR "EURABIA"
Remember my post from a couple of weeks ago about two laudatory The New York Times reviews of books claiming that Europe is being overrun by an unassimilable Muslim horde? (After my post, there was yet another review of one of the books under discussion, also laudatory, on the cover of the Times Book Review.)
Well, funny that none of those reviews mentioned this, which comes up in the Times today:
This year's annual report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, showed that far-right crime rose last year by 16 percent across the country. Most of these offenses were classified as propaganda crimes -- painting swastikas on Jewish headstones or smashing the windows of restaurants run by immigrants -- but politically motivated violent acts like murder, arson and assault accounted for 1,042 of the nearly 20,000 crimes recorded, a rise of 6.3 percent over 2007.
...the far right is on the rise across the Continent, and xenophobia is gaining in this country, not least among youth and not least singling out Muslims. A recent two-year government survey of 20,000 German teenagers classified one in seven as "highly xenophobic" and another 26.2 percent as "fairly xenophobic."
"It was known that the figures were high," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said. "But I’m appalled that they're this high."
Michael Kimmelman of the Times is writing about this because of an ugly incident in Dresden recently:
... on July 1 ... Marwa al-Sherbini, a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist ... was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom, in front of her 3-year-old son, judges and other witnesses, reportedly by the man appealing a fine for having insulted Ms. Sherbini in a park. Identified by German authorities only as a 28-year-old Russian-born German named Alex W., he had called Ms. Sherbini an Islamist, a terrorist and a slut when she asked him to make room for her son on the playground swings. Ms. Sherbini wore a head scarf.
The killer also stabbed Elwi Okaz, Ms. Sherbini's husband and a genetic research scientist, who was critically wounded as he tried to defend her. The police, arriving late on the scene, mistook him for the attacker and shot him in the leg.
More than a week passed before the German government, responding to rising anger across the Arab world, expressed words of sorrow....
How is this possible? Aren't the oswarthy Others thisclose to total domination of Europe, according to writers praised by Times book critics?
Remember my post from a couple of weeks ago about two laudatory The New York Times reviews of books claiming that Europe is being overrun by an unassimilable Muslim horde? (After my post, there was yet another review of one of the books under discussion, also laudatory, on the cover of the Times Book Review.)
Well, funny that none of those reviews mentioned this, which comes up in the Times today:
This year's annual report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, showed that far-right crime rose last year by 16 percent across the country. Most of these offenses were classified as propaganda crimes -- painting swastikas on Jewish headstones or smashing the windows of restaurants run by immigrants -- but politically motivated violent acts like murder, arson and assault accounted for 1,042 of the nearly 20,000 crimes recorded, a rise of 6.3 percent over 2007.
...the far right is on the rise across the Continent, and xenophobia is gaining in this country, not least among youth and not least singling out Muslims. A recent two-year government survey of 20,000 German teenagers classified one in seven as "highly xenophobic" and another 26.2 percent as "fairly xenophobic."
"It was known that the figures were high," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said. "But I’m appalled that they're this high."
Michael Kimmelman of the Times is writing about this because of an ugly incident in Dresden recently:
... on July 1 ... Marwa al-Sherbini, a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist ... was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom, in front of her 3-year-old son, judges and other witnesses, reportedly by the man appealing a fine for having insulted Ms. Sherbini in a park. Identified by German authorities only as a 28-year-old Russian-born German named Alex W., he had called Ms. Sherbini an Islamist, a terrorist and a slut when she asked him to make room for her son on the playground swings. Ms. Sherbini wore a head scarf.
The killer also stabbed Elwi Okaz, Ms. Sherbini's husband and a genetic research scientist, who was critically wounded as he tried to defend her. The police, arriving late on the scene, mistook him for the attacker and shot him in the leg.
More than a week passed before the German government, responding to rising anger across the Arab world, expressed words of sorrow....
How is this possible? Aren't the oswarthy Others thisclose to total domination of Europe, according to writers praised by Times book critics?
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NO POLITICIAN WILL DEFEND LIBERALISM
Gallup published a really striking poll yesterday:
The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal....
In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4.
Got that? There are more self-described conservatives than liberals in all fifty states. (There are more liberals in Washington, D.C.) To a great extent, this is because large numbers of people call themselves "moderate" -- but still. And this despite the fact that Republicans have a significant party-ID advantage in only four states (and have a small advantage in only four others). Democrats dominate the country, but liberals are a distinct minority.
A big problem here is that this is what happens when hardly any high-profile Democrat will stick up for the word "liberal" or the notion of liberalism. None of them will even try to find a way to equate liberalism with plain, decent, common-sense, common-good Americanism. Bill Clinton didn't do it. Barack Obama hasn't done it. (Both have at times done just the opposite.) We have no equivalent to Ronald Reagan, or Rush Limbaugh and the imitation Limbaughs who came in his wake, all of whom said, "Conservatism! Hell yeah!"
What's not clear to me is whether the people who are pro-Democrat but anti-liberal really aren't liberal or just reject the label. "Liberal" may be like "feminist" -- for years, polls have shown that many women don't want to call themselves feminists, yet support the vast majority of feminism's goals.
But whatever's going on, I find myself thinking that if we're never going to have Democrats who work to restore pride in liberalism, what the hell, we'd probably be better off with moderates running the country -- a President Powell or President Bloomberg. I'm not saying this because I prefer moderates -- I'm saying it because the fact that they're seen as moderates seems to give them cover to do some things we progressives want without stirring up crazies on the right, or at least to neutralize the rhetoric of the crazies. Whatever you may say about Bloomberg as mayor, the desire in New York City for a jackboot-wearing mayor on a balcony is gone -- nobody here wants Giuliani back in office, or anyone like him, playing group against group and stirring up hatreds.
I'm not rooting for a centrist president. I'm just saying that if the only apparent liberals we elect are those who won't work to make liberalism seem normal, rather than freakish and dangerous, then we'd probably be better off with a centrist.
And I mean someone who focuses on governing from the middle, and doesn't emphasize scoring political points against liberals, -- like the blowhard Blue Dogs and GOP "moderates" in Congress.
Gallup published a really striking poll yesterday:
The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal....
In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4.
Got that? There are more self-described conservatives than liberals in all fifty states. (There are more liberals in Washington, D.C.) To a great extent, this is because large numbers of people call themselves "moderate" -- but still. And this despite the fact that Republicans have a significant party-ID advantage in only four states (and have a small advantage in only four others). Democrats dominate the country, but liberals are a distinct minority.
A big problem here is that this is what happens when hardly any high-profile Democrat will stick up for the word "liberal" or the notion of liberalism. None of them will even try to find a way to equate liberalism with plain, decent, common-sense, common-good Americanism. Bill Clinton didn't do it. Barack Obama hasn't done it. (Both have at times done just the opposite.) We have no equivalent to Ronald Reagan, or Rush Limbaugh and the imitation Limbaughs who came in his wake, all of whom said, "Conservatism! Hell yeah!"
What's not clear to me is whether the people who are pro-Democrat but anti-liberal really aren't liberal or just reject the label. "Liberal" may be like "feminist" -- for years, polls have shown that many women don't want to call themselves feminists, yet support the vast majority of feminism's goals.
But whatever's going on, I find myself thinking that if we're never going to have Democrats who work to restore pride in liberalism, what the hell, we'd probably be better off with moderates running the country -- a President Powell or President Bloomberg. I'm not saying this because I prefer moderates -- I'm saying it because the fact that they're seen as moderates seems to give them cover to do some things we progressives want without stirring up crazies on the right, or at least to neutralize the rhetoric of the crazies. Whatever you may say about Bloomberg as mayor, the desire in New York City for a jackboot-wearing mayor on a balcony is gone -- nobody here wants Giuliani back in office, or anyone like him, playing group against group and stirring up hatreds.
I'm not rooting for a centrist president. I'm just saying that if the only apparent liberals we elect are those who won't work to make liberalism seem normal, rather than freakish and dangerous, then we'd probably be better off with a centrist.
And I mean someone who focuses on governing from the middle, and doesn't emphasize scoring political points against liberals, -- like the blowhard Blue Dogs and GOP "moderates" in Congress.
Friday, August 14, 2009
NO, SERIOUSLY: DID PALIN RESIGN SPECIFICALLY SO SHE COULD BE A FREELANCE HEALTH-CARE HITWOMAN?
I said a couple of days ago that the reason, or at least one reason, Sarah Palin resigned just might have been because someone thought it would be useful to have her available full-time as a non-office-holding, high-profile delivery system for the wildest, most scurrilous GOP talking points. Now, fresh off her "death panels" victory, she's at it again:
Palin goes on attack after Emanuel's 'Complete Lives System'
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) praised a Senate committee's decision to drop an end-of-life provision from its healthcare reform bill, but continued to pound away at the overall bill -- especially a proposal by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel....
Palin alleged that Emanuel, a White House healthcare adviser and brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, would advocate a "Complete Lives System," which "if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential."
President Obama's silence on the Complete Lives System is troubling, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate asserted, and called on the president to answer questions about the theory.
"Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the 'Complete Lives System'?" Palin asked. "If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on?" ...
That's from The Hill; the article cites this Facebook post from Palin:
...The rationing system proposed by one of President Obama's key health care advisors is particularly disturbing. I'm speaking of the "Complete Lives System" advocated by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president's chief of staff. President Obama has not yet stated any opposition to the "Complete Lives System," a system which, if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential. Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the "Complete Lives System"? If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on? ...
(Emphasis in original.)
Now, the righties have been hammering away at Emanuel for a while; the latest hit is this Washington Times article, which Palin cites.
But it doesn't mention the "Complete Lives System" by name. Palin got that from some other source.
So I'll throw out this theory: she's being deployed -- I don't know who the deployer is or what exactly is in it for her -- to make these memes more visible. Potentially, she can make "Complete Lives System" a scary, evil-sounding household phrase.
And what is the "Complete Lives System"? Well, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with medicine practiced under ordinary circumstances, and as far as I know -- despite what The Hill says -- it doesn't have a damn thing to do with any of the health-care bills. You can read about it in the abstract to this article, of which Emanuel was a co-author (emphasis mine):
Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system -- the complete lives system -- which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.
Got it? This is about allocating stuff we don't have enough of -- organs for transplant, or those vaccines that happen to be in short supply. It is not about introducing general rationing for the hell of it, or out of some Nazi principle.
But I think somebody told Palin to get the phrase into the mix. I think this is her job now. Maybe she didn't resign with doing this as a near-term plan -- but I have my suspicions.
*****
By the way, do you know who else is deeply focused on the "Complete Lives System"? Lyndon LaRouche. Check out this July 30 posting at larouchepac.com. Same message as Sarah's. Weren't the righties denying a couple of days ago that LaRouche is one of theirs? On health care, rhetorically speaking, LaRouche is the
ultimate teabagger.
I said a couple of days ago that the reason, or at least one reason, Sarah Palin resigned just might have been because someone thought it would be useful to have her available full-time as a non-office-holding, high-profile delivery system for the wildest, most scurrilous GOP talking points. Now, fresh off her "death panels" victory, she's at it again:
Palin goes on attack after Emanuel's 'Complete Lives System'
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) praised a Senate committee's decision to drop an end-of-life provision from its healthcare reform bill, but continued to pound away at the overall bill -- especially a proposal by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel....
Palin alleged that Emanuel, a White House healthcare adviser and brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, would advocate a "Complete Lives System," which "if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential."
President Obama's silence on the Complete Lives System is troubling, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate asserted, and called on the president to answer questions about the theory.
"Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the 'Complete Lives System'?" Palin asked. "If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on?" ...
That's from The Hill; the article cites this Facebook post from Palin:
...The rationing system proposed by one of President Obama's key health care advisors is particularly disturbing. I'm speaking of the "Complete Lives System" advocated by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president's chief of staff. President Obama has not yet stated any opposition to the "Complete Lives System," a system which, if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential. Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the "Complete Lives System"? If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on? ...
(Emphasis in original.)
Now, the righties have been hammering away at Emanuel for a while; the latest hit is this Washington Times article, which Palin cites.
But it doesn't mention the "Complete Lives System" by name. Palin got that from some other source.
So I'll throw out this theory: she's being deployed -- I don't know who the deployer is or what exactly is in it for her -- to make these memes more visible. Potentially, she can make "Complete Lives System" a scary, evil-sounding household phrase.
And what is the "Complete Lives System"? Well, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with medicine practiced under ordinary circumstances, and as far as I know -- despite what The Hill says -- it doesn't have a damn thing to do with any of the health-care bills. You can read about it in the abstract to this article, of which Emanuel was a co-author (emphasis mine):
Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system -- the complete lives system -- which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.
Got it? This is about allocating stuff we don't have enough of -- organs for transplant, or those vaccines that happen to be in short supply. It is not about introducing general rationing for the hell of it, or out of some Nazi principle.
But I think somebody told Palin to get the phrase into the mix. I think this is her job now. Maybe she didn't resign with doing this as a near-term plan -- but I have my suspicions.
*****
By the way, do you know who else is deeply focused on the "Complete Lives System"? Lyndon LaRouche. Check out this July 30 posting at larouchepac.com. Same message as Sarah's. Weren't the righties denying a couple of days ago that LaRouche is one of theirs? On health care, rhetorically speaking, LaRouche is the
ultimate teabagger.
A PYRRHIC VICTORY FOR REPUBLICAN LIARS?
(Or just the usual semi-Pyrrhic victory?)
One development in the health-care wars that seems a bit hopeful is that some parts of the mainstream press are acknowledging the extreme nature of right-wing disinformation, and are actually starting to tell us not just what both sides are saying but who's not telling the truth. ABC News has done a couple of impressive fact-checking segments debunking GOP myths, and now The New York Times brings us a front-page above the-fold story tracing the origins of the "death panel" rumor -- which the Times headline flatly calls "false." Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes even do us unabashed partisan bloggers one better by dredging up a Hitler-invoking Washington Times editorial published less than three weeks after Obama was elected, an editorial we overlooked at the time:
In an editorial, the newspaper reminded its readers of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which "children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition."
Noting the "administrative predilections" of the new team at the White House, it urged "anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers."
Are we seeing a sea change in the way the media responds to right-wing lies? No more on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand treatment of all claims as equally valid in circumstances when that's clearly not the case? Is the press really going to start calling liars liars?
Well, that would be nice.
But haven't we been here before? Haven't we seen the GOP use shocking hardball tactics in the past, after which -- that is, after those tactics succeeded -- the mainstream political world, including the press, reached a consensus that the tactics were way over the line?
Isn't that what happened after the Willie Horton ad campaign for George H.W. Bush? It's now seen as a disgrace -- after it worked. Same goes for the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry. Hell, "Willie Horton"" and "Swift Boat" are now synonyms for "unacceptably dishonest political low blow." The terms are marks of shame.
But they got the job done.
So maybe Republicans are going to pay a price in the future for lying like this now. But it won't be much of a price, and it'll probably be only after they defeat reform. Probably some phrase -- maybe "death panels" -- will be shorthand in the future for an attack that's over the line. But the GOP will just keep attacking, and we'll probably just repeat the process, until Democrats find a way to defeat such campaigns in real time.
(Or just the usual semi-Pyrrhic victory?)
One development in the health-care wars that seems a bit hopeful is that some parts of the mainstream press are acknowledging the extreme nature of right-wing disinformation, and are actually starting to tell us not just what both sides are saying but who's not telling the truth. ABC News has done a couple of impressive fact-checking segments debunking GOP myths, and now The New York Times brings us a front-page above the-fold story tracing the origins of the "death panel" rumor -- which the Times headline flatly calls "false." Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes even do us unabashed partisan bloggers one better by dredging up a Hitler-invoking Washington Times editorial published less than three weeks after Obama was elected, an editorial we overlooked at the time:
In an editorial, the newspaper reminded its readers of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which "children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition."
Noting the "administrative predilections" of the new team at the White House, it urged "anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers."
Are we seeing a sea change in the way the media responds to right-wing lies? No more on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand treatment of all claims as equally valid in circumstances when that's clearly not the case? Is the press really going to start calling liars liars?
Well, that would be nice.
But haven't we been here before? Haven't we seen the GOP use shocking hardball tactics in the past, after which -- that is, after those tactics succeeded -- the mainstream political world, including the press, reached a consensus that the tactics were way over the line?
Isn't that what happened after the Willie Horton ad campaign for George H.W. Bush? It's now seen as a disgrace -- after it worked. Same goes for the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry. Hell, "Willie Horton"" and "Swift Boat" are now synonyms for "unacceptably dishonest political low blow." The terms are marks of shame.
But they got the job done.
So maybe Republicans are going to pay a price in the future for lying like this now. But it won't be much of a price, and it'll probably be only after they defeat reform. Probably some phrase -- maybe "death panels" -- will be shorthand in the future for an attack that's over the line. But the GOP will just keep attacking, and we'll probably just repeat the process, until Democrats find a way to defeat such campaigns in real time.
DOES PEGGY NOONAN EVEN READ WHAT SHE WRITES?
Noonan in her latest column (which is about health-care reform):
It is divisive save in one respect. The Obama White House has done the near impossible: It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians -- they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again.
Noonan a mere 12 paragraphs later:
Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill.... He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold.
So "the near impossible" is so near impossible that Obama did it practically before the ground crew cleaned up after the inaugural. And then he did it again with health care. In between which, I guess, Republicans were bitterly divided -- remember? They were at daggers drawn, some arguing that Obama is Hitler, some that he's Stalin. Republicans are always hopelessly divided by these factional squabbles, as they are by their utter lack of message discipline and their failure to build a cable-news/think-tank/talk-radio noise machine. But, miraculously for them, Obama has come along and helped them overcome these enormous inherent disadvantages -- twice. Each time for the first time.
Noonan in her latest column (which is about health-care reform):
It is divisive save in one respect. The Obama White House has done the near impossible: It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians -- they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again.
Noonan a mere 12 paragraphs later:
Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill.... He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold.
So "the near impossible" is so near impossible that Obama did it practically before the ground crew cleaned up after the inaugural. And then he did it again with health care. In between which, I guess, Republicans were bitterly divided -- remember? They were at daggers drawn, some arguing that Obama is Hitler, some that he's Stalin. Republicans are always hopelessly divided by these factional squabbles, as they are by their utter lack of message discipline and their failure to build a cable-news/think-tank/talk-radio noise machine. But, miraculously for them, Obama has come along and helped them overcome these enormous inherent disadvantages -- twice. Each time for the first time.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
IS THERE AN ECHO IN HERE?
Charles Grassley:
We [on the Senate Finance Committee] dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly. Maybe others can defend a bill like the Pelosi bill that leaves major issues open to interpretation, but I can't.
Rudy Giuliani:
People assume these Death Panels will be created. They [Democratic legislators] have created that suggestion in the ambiguity of the legislation.
The Republicans are just so freaking good at this -- tweaking the party line every day, or even every few hours, and lining up one person after another to say precisely the same thing. Today's message: See, we're not crazies who think Democrats deliberately put death panels in the legislation -- we think they could slip in accidentally! And that wasn't yesterday's message at all -- or even the message as of first thing this morning. But now they're all locked in on it.
Republicans couldn't govern their way out of a paper bag, but at message discipline, they leave Democrats in the dust.
Charles Grassley:
We [on the Senate Finance Committee] dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly. Maybe others can defend a bill like the Pelosi bill that leaves major issues open to interpretation, but I can't.
Rudy Giuliani:
People assume these Death Panels will be created. They [Democratic legislators] have created that suggestion in the ambiguity of the legislation.
The Republicans are just so freaking good at this -- tweaking the party line every day, or even every few hours, and lining up one person after another to say precisely the same thing. Today's message: See, we're not crazies who think Democrats deliberately put death panels in the legislation -- we think they could slip in accidentally! And that wasn't yesterday's message at all -- or even the message as of first thing this morning. But now they're all locked in on it.
Republicans couldn't govern their way out of a paper bag, but at message discipline, they leave Democrats in the dust.
HOW TO DEAL WITH A WINGNUT MOB
Tom Hilton has the best advice I've seen so far.
*****
UPDATE: D. Sidhe proposes another smart idea in the comments, though it may be too late for that one.
Tom Hilton has the best advice I've seen so far.
*****
UPDATE: D. Sidhe proposes another smart idea in the comments, though it may be too late for that one.
OBAMA TACKS RIGHT, GRASSLEY (AND OTHERS) TACK FURTHER RIGHT
Yesterday, as you know, Chuck Grassley, the supposedly very serious and reasonable Republican senator, endorsed the notion that health-care reform could include "death panels." After reading this New York Times story today, I think I know why.
To put it simply, President Obama is being too conciliatory -- apparently he'll compromise on just about anything. To you and me, that means Obama's working to produce a bill that's hopelessly watered down -- but to Grassley, who obviously has no intention of voting for any health-care bill, it's a threat: if the bill is watered down, he'll need a reason to vote no, because he's one of those Republicans who claim to want some sort of reform. So if a watered-down Obama bill won't give him an excuse to vote no, he'll make up his own excuses -- or second the made-up excuses of others.
How watered down is the bill likely to be? Let's go to the Times story:
... Behind the scenes, ... Mr. Obama and his advisers have been quite active, sometimes negotiating deals with a degree of cold-eyed political realism potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric.
Early last month, for example, hospital officials were poised to appear at the White House to announce a deal limiting their industry's share of the costs of the overhaul proposal when a wave of jitters swept through the group. Senator Max Baucus, the Finance Committee chairman and a party to the deal, had abruptly pulled out of the event. Was he backing away from his end of the deal?
Not to worry, Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff, told the hospital lobbyists, according to White House officials and lobbyists briefed on the call. The White House was standing behind the deal, Mr. Messina told them, capping the industry’s costs at a maximum of $155 billion over 10 years in exchange for its political support....
The Finance Committee ... appears to be coalescing around the idea of nonprofit insurance cooperatives instead of a government-run plan....
Asked whether the president would accept the weaker co-op, [White House chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel declined to comment. "I am not going to fast-forward the process," he said.
Industry lobbyists and moderate Democrats in both chambers, though, argue that the White House's actions behind the scenes show a recognition that the finance panel's anticipated compromise is the most likely template for any final legislation.
Wow -- no public option, no further cost savings from hospitals. And Grassley clearly knows this:
Mr. Obama and his top aides have immersed themselves in the Senate Finance Committee process. The president talks to [Senator Max] Baucus several times a week, people briefed on their conversations say. Mr. Obama has also held a few calls with the panel's ranking Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.
(The story makes clear that the White House is all but ignoring what's going on in the House of Representatives.)
And this story appears a week or so after we learned that the Obama White House affirmed a sweet deal with the drug companies:
Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.
... the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul....
Republicans, when pressed, pretend to want some kind of reform -- they just say they don't want the really liberal stuff.
But if Barack Obama is negotiating away all the liberal stuff, and what they (and their corporate masters) really want is no bill at all, how do the self-styled reasonable Republicans vote no?
They vote no by lying about "death panels" and the like. That gives them the cover they think they need with the public.
And the more Obama compromises, the more outrageous the lies are going to get, and we'll hear them more frequently from more and more mainstream Republicans.
*****
UPDATE: As you probably know, Grassley and the other members of the GOP bucket brigade of liars have managed to get the end-of-life non-"death-panel" provision removed from the Senate health-care bill, a victory for stupidity Grassley now boasts about:
"On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly."
Ah, but is this a victory? Partly. It makes Democrats look weak -- always a good thing if your prime directive is destruction of the opposition. But now what will Grassley find unacceptable so he has an excuse to vote no?
Oh, plenty. From Grassley's statement:
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. On the end-of-life issue, there’s a big difference between a simple educational campaign, as some advocates want, and the way the House committee-passed bill pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care, while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone.
So see? The Democrats are still doing things in the health-care bill-drafting process that are eeeevil, EEEEEVIL I tell you! Those sneaky atheist homosexual pornographers will surely slip in something nasty in conference committee, just you wait! So stay afraid, teabaggers. Stay very afraid.
Yesterday, as you know, Chuck Grassley, the supposedly very serious and reasonable Republican senator, endorsed the notion that health-care reform could include "death panels." After reading this New York Times story today, I think I know why.
To put it simply, President Obama is being too conciliatory -- apparently he'll compromise on just about anything. To you and me, that means Obama's working to produce a bill that's hopelessly watered down -- but to Grassley, who obviously has no intention of voting for any health-care bill, it's a threat: if the bill is watered down, he'll need a reason to vote no, because he's one of those Republicans who claim to want some sort of reform. So if a watered-down Obama bill won't give him an excuse to vote no, he'll make up his own excuses -- or second the made-up excuses of others.
How watered down is the bill likely to be? Let's go to the Times story:
... Behind the scenes, ... Mr. Obama and his advisers have been quite active, sometimes negotiating deals with a degree of cold-eyed political realism potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric.
Early last month, for example, hospital officials were poised to appear at the White House to announce a deal limiting their industry's share of the costs of the overhaul proposal when a wave of jitters swept through the group. Senator Max Baucus, the Finance Committee chairman and a party to the deal, had abruptly pulled out of the event. Was he backing away from his end of the deal?
Not to worry, Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff, told the hospital lobbyists, according to White House officials and lobbyists briefed on the call. The White House was standing behind the deal, Mr. Messina told them, capping the industry’s costs at a maximum of $155 billion over 10 years in exchange for its political support....
The Finance Committee ... appears to be coalescing around the idea of nonprofit insurance cooperatives instead of a government-run plan....
Asked whether the president would accept the weaker co-op, [White House chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel declined to comment. "I am not going to fast-forward the process," he said.
Industry lobbyists and moderate Democrats in both chambers, though, argue that the White House's actions behind the scenes show a recognition that the finance panel's anticipated compromise is the most likely template for any final legislation.
Wow -- no public option, no further cost savings from hospitals. And Grassley clearly knows this:
Mr. Obama and his top aides have immersed themselves in the Senate Finance Committee process. The president talks to [Senator Max] Baucus several times a week, people briefed on their conversations say. Mr. Obama has also held a few calls with the panel's ranking Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.
(The story makes clear that the White House is all but ignoring what's going on in the House of Representatives.)
And this story appears a week or so after we learned that the Obama White House affirmed a sweet deal with the drug companies:
Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.
... the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul....
Republicans, when pressed, pretend to want some kind of reform -- they just say they don't want the really liberal stuff.
But if Barack Obama is negotiating away all the liberal stuff, and what they (and their corporate masters) really want is no bill at all, how do the self-styled reasonable Republicans vote no?
They vote no by lying about "death panels" and the like. That gives them the cover they think they need with the public.
And the more Obama compromises, the more outrageous the lies are going to get, and we'll hear them more frequently from more and more mainstream Republicans.
*****
UPDATE: As you probably know, Grassley and the other members of the GOP bucket brigade of liars have managed to get the end-of-life non-"death-panel" provision removed from the Senate health-care bill, a victory for stupidity Grassley now boasts about:
"On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly."
Ah, but is this a victory? Partly. It makes Democrats look weak -- always a good thing if your prime directive is destruction of the opposition. But now what will Grassley find unacceptable so he has an excuse to vote no?
Oh, plenty. From Grassley's statement:
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. On the end-of-life issue, there’s a big difference between a simple educational campaign, as some advocates want, and the way the House committee-passed bill pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care, while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone.
So see? The Democrats are still doing things in the health-care bill-drafting process that are eeeevil, EEEEEVIL I tell you! Those sneaky atheist homosexual pornographers will surely slip in something nasty in conference committee, just you wait! So stay afraid, teabaggers. Stay very afraid.
SUDDENLY I'M SURPRISINGLY HAPPY THAT WE NEVER IMPEACHED BUSH
From a Barton Gellman story in The Washington Post about friction between Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, which is likely to be discussed in Cheney's forthcoming memoir (emphasis added):
"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," said an associate who discussed the book with Cheney. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.' Rather, there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further."
Holy crap. Just imagine.
In the parallel universe where the rule of law actually matters in America and Democrats are occasionally allowed to prevail, the smart play, obviously, would have been to impeach and convict Cheney first. Back here in the real America, of course, we were never going to come within a country mile of a two-thirds Senate vote to chuck either of them out of office. Even so, the mere presence of this evil bastard a heartbeat away was enough to keep me from ever saying "IMPEACH BUSH," full stop.
*****
And what ideas drove Cheney all those years, according to Gellman? Well, apart from the notion that Iran and North Korea were "ripe for 'regime change,'" there was this:
John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, said the former vice president is driven, now as before, by the nightmare of a hostile state acquiring nuclear weapons and passing them to terrorists. Aaron Friedberg, another of Cheney's foreign policy advisers, said Cheney believes "that many people find it very difficult to hold that idea in their head, really, and conjure with it, and see what it implies."
You know what? We don't have a problem conjuring with that idea. We just think it's a problem that needs to be approached with all the tools in the toolbox -- including the ones that don't involve killing, brutalizing, or repressing people. You know -- diplomacy. Multilateralism. Non-proliferation. Maybe a few spies who actually know something about the countries and organizations we're worried about, and who can speak the relevant languages.
But that's not Cheney's way of thinking. He says what drives him is fear of this outcome, but that's just an excuse. What really drives him is the desire to use the tools of authoritarianism. In this, he reminds me of certain gun nuts -- they love guns so much that their entire philosophy of life is structured around gun ownership. They look around and see a country full of criminal and illegal-alien marauders, along with tyrannical or potentially tyrannical government officials. They feel this way because guns seem like the answer to precisely those problems -- so those are the only problems they see. When you have a hammer, all you see are nails.
Cheney obsesses in his peculiar way over the threat of nuclear terrorism because it seems like precisely the problem for which his greatest pleasure, the wielding of state power, is the solution. That's his hammer/nail pairing. When he's in the government, he just wants an excuse to turn the Executive Branch into a dictatorship. Fear of rogues with nukes is Cheney's obsession because it is precisely that excuse.
From a Barton Gellman story in The Washington Post about friction between Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, which is likely to be discussed in Cheney's forthcoming memoir (emphasis added):
"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," said an associate who discussed the book with Cheney. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.' Rather, there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further."
Holy crap. Just imagine.
In the parallel universe where the rule of law actually matters in America and Democrats are occasionally allowed to prevail, the smart play, obviously, would have been to impeach and convict Cheney first. Back here in the real America, of course, we were never going to come within a country mile of a two-thirds Senate vote to chuck either of them out of office. Even so, the mere presence of this evil bastard a heartbeat away was enough to keep me from ever saying "IMPEACH BUSH," full stop.
*****
And what ideas drove Cheney all those years, according to Gellman? Well, apart from the notion that Iran and North Korea were "ripe for 'regime change,'" there was this:
John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, said the former vice president is driven, now as before, by the nightmare of a hostile state acquiring nuclear weapons and passing them to terrorists. Aaron Friedberg, another of Cheney's foreign policy advisers, said Cheney believes "that many people find it very difficult to hold that idea in their head, really, and conjure with it, and see what it implies."
You know what? We don't have a problem conjuring with that idea. We just think it's a problem that needs to be approached with all the tools in the toolbox -- including the ones that don't involve killing, brutalizing, or repressing people. You know -- diplomacy. Multilateralism. Non-proliferation. Maybe a few spies who actually know something about the countries and organizations we're worried about, and who can speak the relevant languages.
But that's not Cheney's way of thinking. He says what drives him is fear of this outcome, but that's just an excuse. What really drives him is the desire to use the tools of authoritarianism. In this, he reminds me of certain gun nuts -- they love guns so much that their entire philosophy of life is structured around gun ownership. They look around and see a country full of criminal and illegal-alien marauders, along with tyrannical or potentially tyrannical government officials. They feel this way because guns seem like the answer to precisely those problems -- so those are the only problems they see. When you have a hammer, all you see are nails.
Cheney obsesses in his peculiar way over the threat of nuclear terrorism because it seems like precisely the problem for which his greatest pleasure, the wielding of state power, is the solution. That's his hammer/nail pairing. When he's in the government, he just wants an excuse to turn the Executive Branch into a dictatorship. Fear of rogues with nukes is Cheney's obsession because it is precisely that excuse.
JANUARY 20 WAS BARACK OBAMA'S "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" DAY
His troops were valiant and he'd had a brilliant plan for taking the capital, but now we can look back to January 20, 2009, and realize that Barack Obama was naive to think major combat operations had ended. He never saw the insurgency coming. He and his people seemed to think that there simply wouldn't be that kind of factional strife after the old regime fell; they believed that, despite years of tension between the factions, it would end in an instant and the citizens of the country would immediately see themselves as united.
As the insurgency grew and began to make the country ungovernable, the Obama team and its allies downplayed it as a ragtag collection of end-timers who'd soon be irrelevant. His troops knew how to wage a traditional campaign, but hadn't given serious thought to the problem of dealing with a chaotic aftermath. When it came to the "postwar" period, Obama never really had a plan.
His forces simply have no training in this kind of warfare. Now they have to learn on the fly, and their learning curve seems to be slow. They appear to believe that the forces they're now fighting are thinking traditionally -- they can't seem to accept the fact that the enemy genuinely wants anarchy and a failed state.
How Obama deals with this insurgency will be the main test of his presidency.
His troops were valiant and he'd had a brilliant plan for taking the capital, but now we can look back to January 20, 2009, and realize that Barack Obama was naive to think major combat operations had ended. He never saw the insurgency coming. He and his people seemed to think that there simply wouldn't be that kind of factional strife after the old regime fell; they believed that, despite years of tension between the factions, it would end in an instant and the citizens of the country would immediately see themselves as united.
As the insurgency grew and began to make the country ungovernable, the Obama team and its allies downplayed it as a ragtag collection of end-timers who'd soon be irrelevant. His troops knew how to wage a traditional campaign, but hadn't given serious thought to the problem of dealing with a chaotic aftermath. When it came to the "postwar" period, Obama never really had a plan.
His forces simply have no training in this kind of warfare. Now they have to learn on the fly, and their learning curve seems to be slow. They appear to believe that the forces they're now fighting are thinking traditionally -- they can't seem to accept the fact that the enemy genuinely wants anarchy and a failed state.
How Obama deals with this insurgency will be the main test of his presidency.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
THEY'RE WINNING. AS USUAL.
Well, so much for Marc Ambinder's theory that right-wingers have overplayed their hand. A new USA Today/Gallup poll says that the right is winning the health care wars, just the way the right has won most of these things for a couple of decades now:
... In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say the sometimes heated protests at sessions held by members of Congress have made them more sympathetic to the protesters' views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.
Independents by 2-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now.
... There's some tolerance for noisy disputes at town hall meetings. By 51%-41%, those surveyed say individuals making "angry attacks" on a health care bill reflected "democracy in action" rather than "abuse of democracy." However, by 59%-33% they say "shouting down supporters" of a health care bill was an abuse of democracy....
Greg Sargent is confused, but he shouldn't be:
... I'm going to need your help interpreting these numbers.
... a majority says "angry attacks" at town halls represent democracy in action, but an equally large majority says "shouting down supporters" is an abuse of democracy? ...
It's simple: Right-wingers have many more outlets through which they've been able to flog the message that this is just healthily democratic case of speaking truth to power. So first they use corporate-generated lies, half-truths, and hysterical rumors to hijack the debate, then they use a well-developed, multi-pronged propaganda infrastructure to dominate the debate about the hijacked debate. I know, I know: they'll talk about this as if it's some samizdat effort up against the great liberal monolith. But that's only plausible if you believe that the #1 cable news channel, all the top talk-radio hosts, and the only newspaper mogul in America who doesn't seem to be on the verge of shutting down his papers to be samizdat. Not to mention a large percentage of the best-funded advocacy groups.
The last two election cycles were fun, but for decades we were told that right-wingers and Republicans are "normal," even when they engage in racist attacks or blow up federal buildings, while liberals and Democrats are dirty hippies who don't go to church and eat arugula and use four-letter words in public. That ingrained notion doesn't go away overnight, or even in a few years. And the right-wing/corporate noise machine knows just how to tap into it.
****
UPDATE: More of the same from Pew:
"Among those who had heard at least a little about the meetings," the Pew Center's Andrew Kohut reports tonight, "61 percent say they think the way people have been protesting is appropriate." And just 34 percent said they view the protests as inappropriate.
Game over. They won. Let's pick another battle and move on.
Well, so much for Marc Ambinder's theory that right-wingers have overplayed their hand. A new USA Today/Gallup poll says that the right is winning the health care wars, just the way the right has won most of these things for a couple of decades now:
... In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say the sometimes heated protests at sessions held by members of Congress have made them more sympathetic to the protesters' views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.
Independents by 2-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now.
... There's some tolerance for noisy disputes at town hall meetings. By 51%-41%, those surveyed say individuals making "angry attacks" on a health care bill reflected "democracy in action" rather than "abuse of democracy." However, by 59%-33% they say "shouting down supporters" of a health care bill was an abuse of democracy....
Greg Sargent is confused, but he shouldn't be:
... I'm going to need your help interpreting these numbers.
... a majority says "angry attacks" at town halls represent democracy in action, but an equally large majority says "shouting down supporters" is an abuse of democracy? ...
It's simple: Right-wingers have many more outlets through which they've been able to flog the message that this is just healthily democratic case of speaking truth to power. So first they use corporate-generated lies, half-truths, and hysterical rumors to hijack the debate, then they use a well-developed, multi-pronged propaganda infrastructure to dominate the debate about the hijacked debate. I know, I know: they'll talk about this as if it's some samizdat effort up against the great liberal monolith. But that's only plausible if you believe that the #1 cable news channel, all the top talk-radio hosts, and the only newspaper mogul in America who doesn't seem to be on the verge of shutting down his papers to be samizdat. Not to mention a large percentage of the best-funded advocacy groups.
The last two election cycles were fun, but for decades we were told that right-wingers and Republicans are "normal," even when they engage in racist attacks or blow up federal buildings, while liberals and Democrats are dirty hippies who don't go to church and eat arugula and use four-letter words in public. That ingrained notion doesn't go away overnight, or even in a few years. And the right-wing/corporate noise machine knows just how to tap into it.
****
UPDATE: More of the same from Pew:
"Among those who had heard at least a little about the meetings," the Pew Center's Andrew Kohut reports tonight, "61 percent say they think the way people have been protesting is appropriate." And just 34 percent said they view the protests as inappropriate.
Game over. They won. Let's pick another battle and move on.
IS SANTORUM NUTS? NOT COMPLETELY
I'll explain why below:
Add former Sen. Rick Santorum to the list of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates.
POLITICO has learned Santorum will visit first-in-the-nation Iowa this fall for a series of appearances before the sort of conservative activists who dominate the state GOP’s key presidential caucuses.
The Pennsylvanian, who lost his 2006 reelection bid, will visit Iowa on October 1, appearing on a Des Moines radio talk show and speaking to a luncheon and workshop of Iowa's Right to Life group before heading east to Dubuque, where he'll headline a fundraiser for the conservative America’s Future Fund PAC and then speak about the future of the GOP to a public audience in the Mississippi River city.
“Your voice becomes more amplified when you go to a place like Iowa or New Hampshire,” Santorum explained in an interview Tuesday about the visit....
Could he win the election? I doubt it -- obviously, he got trounced in '06 in a classic swing state. But the GOP nomination? He might in a great position to win that.
Think about it: the GOP is wallowing in a sense of victimization right now. It considers even unquestionably fair election results, like those of the 2008 presidential contest, to be evidence that the country is being stolen from its rightful owners.
Who better to capitalize on that wounded, whiny sense of injustice than a guy who lost an election fair and square? No, don't answer that -- I know who better: Sarah Palin, who quit all on her own and yet has persuaded her followers that she's a victim of the left.
But if Palin doesn't run? If she finds some other way to gratify her ego? Santorum could seize the victim mantle. Hell, he can even claim sexual victimhood, just like Palin after the Letterman jokes about her daughter -- he'll probably boast about being subject to sneering for his 2003 "man on dog" remark as well as about the fact that his name has been turned into a sexual joke.
And he's a substitute Palin in another way as well: Palin uses her Down Syndrome baby as a political prop, while Santorum does the same with his stillborn son:
In his Senate office, on a shelf next to an autographed baseball, Sen. Rick Santorum keeps a framed photo of his son Gabriel Michael, the fourth of his seven children. Named for two archangels, Gabriel Michael was born prematurely, at 20 weeks, on Oct. 11, 1996, and lived two hours outside the womb.
Upon their son's death, Rick and Karen Santorum opted not to bring his body to a funeral home. Instead, they bundled him in a blanket and drove him to Karen's parents' home in Pittsburgh. There, they spent several hours kissing and cuddling Gabriel with his three siblings, ages 6, 4 and 1 1/2. They took photos, sang lullabies in his ear and held a private Mass.
"That's my little guy," Santorum says, pointing to the photo of Gabriel, in which his tiny physique is framed by his father's hand. The senator often speaks of his late son in the present tense. It is a rare instance in which he talks softly.
He and Karen brought Gabriel's body home so their children could "absorb and understand that they had a brother," Santorum says. "We wanted them to see that he was real," not an abstraction, he says. Not a "fetus," either, as Rick and Karen were appalled to see him described -- "a 20-week-old fetus" -- on a hospital form. They changed the form to read "20-week-old baby."
Nice how he pointed this out to a Washington Post reporter.
(And on the subject of making sure that the press knows what a moral guy he is, read this, in which we learn how careful Santorum was in 2006 to get out the message that he prayed every day for the Senate opponent who was in the process of defeating him.)
I think he could be the ideal candidate in a party in which the #1 organizing idea is feeling sorry for yourself, as you pat yourself on the back for being the embodiment of virtue.
I'll explain why below:
Add former Sen. Rick Santorum to the list of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates.
POLITICO has learned Santorum will visit first-in-the-nation Iowa this fall for a series of appearances before the sort of conservative activists who dominate the state GOP’s key presidential caucuses.
The Pennsylvanian, who lost his 2006 reelection bid, will visit Iowa on October 1, appearing on a Des Moines radio talk show and speaking to a luncheon and workshop of Iowa's Right to Life group before heading east to Dubuque, where he'll headline a fundraiser for the conservative America’s Future Fund PAC and then speak about the future of the GOP to a public audience in the Mississippi River city.
“Your voice becomes more amplified when you go to a place like Iowa or New Hampshire,” Santorum explained in an interview Tuesday about the visit....
Could he win the election? I doubt it -- obviously, he got trounced in '06 in a classic swing state. But the GOP nomination? He might in a great position to win that.
Think about it: the GOP is wallowing in a sense of victimization right now. It considers even unquestionably fair election results, like those of the 2008 presidential contest, to be evidence that the country is being stolen from its rightful owners.
Who better to capitalize on that wounded, whiny sense of injustice than a guy who lost an election fair and square? No, don't answer that -- I know who better: Sarah Palin, who quit all on her own and yet has persuaded her followers that she's a victim of the left.
But if Palin doesn't run? If she finds some other way to gratify her ego? Santorum could seize the victim mantle. Hell, he can even claim sexual victimhood, just like Palin after the Letterman jokes about her daughter -- he'll probably boast about being subject to sneering for his 2003 "man on dog" remark as well as about the fact that his name has been turned into a sexual joke.
And he's a substitute Palin in another way as well: Palin uses her Down Syndrome baby as a political prop, while Santorum does the same with his stillborn son:
In his Senate office, on a shelf next to an autographed baseball, Sen. Rick Santorum keeps a framed photo of his son Gabriel Michael, the fourth of his seven children. Named for two archangels, Gabriel Michael was born prematurely, at 20 weeks, on Oct. 11, 1996, and lived two hours outside the womb.
Upon their son's death, Rick and Karen Santorum opted not to bring his body to a funeral home. Instead, they bundled him in a blanket and drove him to Karen's parents' home in Pittsburgh. There, they spent several hours kissing and cuddling Gabriel with his three siblings, ages 6, 4 and 1 1/2. They took photos, sang lullabies in his ear and held a private Mass.
"That's my little guy," Santorum says, pointing to the photo of Gabriel, in which his tiny physique is framed by his father's hand. The senator often speaks of his late son in the present tense. It is a rare instance in which he talks softly.
He and Karen brought Gabriel's body home so their children could "absorb and understand that they had a brother," Santorum says. "We wanted them to see that he was real," not an abstraction, he says. Not a "fetus," either, as Rick and Karen were appalled to see him described -- "a 20-week-old fetus" -- on a hospital form. They changed the form to read "20-week-old baby."
Nice how he pointed this out to a Washington Post reporter.
(And on the subject of making sure that the press knows what a moral guy he is, read this, in which we learn how careful Santorum was in 2006 to get out the message that he prayed every day for the Senate opponent who was in the process of defeating him.)
I think he could be the ideal candidate in a party in which the #1 organizing idea is feeling sorry for yourself, as you pat yourself on the back for being the embodiment of virtue.
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