Peter Daou was watching Al Gore among the dignitaries at the memorial service for Ted Kennedy… and noted that when Dubya walked in, Al took a sudden interest in what was going on across the room — turning completely around so he wouldn’t come face to face with the Shrub.
Phoenix Woman wrote at Firedoglake yesterday (actually, twice) about the emerging Village contention that, why, of course Ted Kennedy would have swiftly and gleefully traded away the public option to pass something that could be called healthcare reform legislation, however useless the end result might be.
The latest attempt to make this leaden trial balloon fly comes from columnist Steven Pearlstein in this morning’s Washington Post:
Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.
. . . [in 1971], Nixon asked Congress to require for the first time that all companies provide a health plan for their employees, with federal subsidies for low-income workers. Nixon was particularly intrigued by a new idea called health maintenance organizations, which held the promise of providing high-quality care at lower prices by relying on salaried physicians to manage and coordinate patient care.
At first, Kennedy rejected Nixon’s proposal as nothing more than a bonanza for the insurance industry that would create a two-class system of health care in America. But after Nixon won reelection, Kennedy began a series of secret negotiations with the White House that almost led to a public agreement. In the end, Nixon backed out after receiving pressure from small-business owners and the American Medical Association. And Kennedy himself decided to back off after receiving heavy pressure from labor leaders, who urged him to hold out for a single-payer system once Democrats recaptured the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Thirty-five years later, the single-payer dream of Democratic liberals still remains politically out of reach. . .
The simple lesson from this story — and certainly the one Kennedy himself drew — is that when it comes to historic breakthroughs in social policy, make the best deal you can get, leaving it to subsequent generations to perfect.
But not so fast. As anyone who saw Sicko might remember, what Pearlstein describes as Kennedy’s initial reaction was, in fact, an entirely accurate assessment of Nixon’s motivation in promoting HMOs — as confirmed by a taped conversation between Tricky Dick and aide John Ehrlichman: (transcript condensed to remove cross-talk)
Nixon: “. . . You know, I’m not too keen on any of these damn medical programs.”
Ehrlichman: “This is a private enterprise one.”
President Nixon: “Well, that appeals to me.”
Ehrlichman: “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. . . . I had Edgar Kaiser come in [and] talk to me about this, and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make.”
President Nixon: “Fine.”
Ehrlichman: “… and the incentives run the right way.”
President Nixon: “Not bad.”
Maybe any deal that a leading Republican politician and his corporate allies would have signed off on in 1971 wouldn’t have been worth agreeing to. Maybe that’s still the case now.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
You know, Huckleberry really had me fooled on the campaign trail. I thought he was a decent, if misguide fellow. This pronouncement shows that he is just as evil and self-serving as any Repug – just a better actor:
“The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.”
via Huckabee: Kennedy Would Have Been Urged To Die Earlier Under ObamaCare.
One didn’t live to see his long-held dream come to fruition. The other did.
I know the liberal ‘party line’ is that cash for clunkers was a wild success for the Obama stimulus package, rapidly getting cash into the economy and particularly in a stressed out sector, the auto industry.
Well I’ve got a clunker from ’96. Naturally I thought “I wanna get me some of that cash!” No such luck. In ’96 I bought the most fuel economical 4-door sedan I could get, a Mazda manual transmission that used to get me about 36 mpg (now maybe about 30). I discovered there was a bottom threshold on the gas mileage and my car didn’t qualify.
So being a conscientious environmentalist, buying a fuel sensible vehicle really just makes me a cash-cow chump who must pay for my good behavior by paying for self-absorbed assholes who chose gas guzzlers back in the day.
Seriously, this really blows.
Forget giving cash to jackasses, fuck the carrot, what we need is the stick – let’s slam them with higher gasoline taxes – you’ll see clunker SUVs disappear off the roads far faster than this silly rebate program. And if the government really wants to shower cash on us, just give us some god damned $5K gift certificates we can spend on whatever we want. Or better, just cut my taxes by $5K, I promise I’ll spend it on something.
Kim Gamel and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press report from Baghdad today:
The Iranian-backed Shiite parties that helped propel Iraq’s prime minister into power three years ago dumped him Monday as their candidate for re-election, forming a new alliance to contest the January vote.
The move dealt a blow to Nouri al-Maliki’s chances to keep his job next year and set the stage for a showdown between competing factions in the Shiite coalition that had dominated Iraq’s government since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
. . . The Shiite prime minister’s efforts to win public confidence by portraying himself as a champion of security have taken a battering in recent weeks. A wave of horrific bombings has called into question the government’s ability to protect the Iraqi people two months after most U.S. forces pulled out of urban areas.
. . . Monday’s political announcement — made with fanfare at a news conference — represents a major realignment.
The new bloc, called the Iraqi National Alliance, will include the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, or SIIC, and [Moqtada] al-Sadr’s bloc . . .
. . . [Maliki] stayed out of the new alliance because leaders refused to guarantee him the prime minister’s spot, officials said. Rumored possibilities for the job include new alliance members ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, current Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and even Former Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite.
(*A brief pause here, to allow readers to shudder*)
The realignment does not immediately threaten al-Maliki’s position as prime minister, but points to stormy politics in the election campaign and beyond, as U.S. troops begin scaling back their presence.
Supreme Council lawmaker Reda Jawad Taqi said a last-ditch meeting was held Sunday to try to bring al-Maliki into the fold but it failed to overcome the differences.
Then again, with at least five months to go before the elections, nothing can be considered final:
One of al-Maliki’s advisers, Hassan al-Sineid, said in a televised response that the prime minister and the leaders of the new alliance differed over “the mechanism of participation in the alliance and the need to open this alliance to include a broad range of political powers.”
In other words, the assorted hucksters couldn’t agree on the latest division of the loot (i.e., the respective number of seats in the Iraqi parliament and allotted Cabinet posts, and the opportunities for graft that go with them).
The prime minister instead is working to form an alternate coalition. He is reaching out to a prominent Sunni sheik in Anbar province, whose followers include fighters who joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaida in Iraq.
. . . Despite Monday’s announcement, the new Shiite alliance was careful to leave the door open for the Dawa Party to join later.
Abdul-Mahdi, a top SIIC member, was among those reaching out to Dawa, saying it was important to present a strong united front that can address the overwhelming challenges facing the country.
Bet on Grand Ayatollah/cat-herder-in-chief Ali Sistani to get involved, either personally or through proxies in Iran, to referee the dispute. By the time the election rolls around, the team is likely to be back together again.
Update: Both Juan Cole and Joel Wing at Musings on Iraq cite claims/rumors endorsing my hunch that the sticking point is how many seats Maliki’s party would be allotted as part of the allied election slate. (Separately, there’s a detailed breakdown of the factions involved from Reidar Visser.)
Prof. Cole raises a point I nearly suggested in my original post — Maliki might run on a different slate from the rest of Team Shiite, then agree to form a governing coalition after the election. The possibly too-clever thinking at work in this scenario could be that Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate, while the Hakim-Sadr-et al. group could pose as running against the Maliki regime… even though (surprise!) everyone would wind up in effect reelecting Team Shiite, with Maliki on top.
Mainland wingnuts may obsessed with their fantasies of a Kenyan birth, but here in Hawaii there is no doubt that Obama is 100% Hawaiian.
Remember Shrubya’s infamous “free speech” zones that he used to isolate protestors sometimes miles from where he might be speaking…all in the name of “security?”
In these days of mounting wrong-wing rage, featuring shouting lunatics in disrupting town hall meetings and outside overly armed nut jobs prowl around Presidential appearances waiting for some provokation to empty their magazines on their fellow Americans.
Forget “free speech” zones, the very thought has become horribly quaint – I propose that we establish “free fire” zones where the rageoids can be free to open fire. ESPN could even create a special channel to broadcast the wingnut on wingnut action while the rest of us can go on quietly and respectfully debating the important issues of the day.
The Washington Post reports today:
The Iraqi government announced Monday that it intends to let voters decide in January whether the departure of U.S. troops should be accelerated.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet is submitting a draft law to parliament asking it to authorize and fund a referendum on the bilateral agreement that regulates the presence of U.S. troops, the government announced.
The referendum would be held during January’s national election.
U.S. officials have quietly lobbied the Iraqi government to suspend plans to hold the referendum, because they’re all but certain voters would annul the agreement.
If that were to happen, U.S. troops would have one year to depart, moving up their targeted December 2011 withdrawal date by almost a year.
. . . When the security agreement was negotiated last year, some lawmakers demanded that its implementation on Jan. 1 be followed by a referendum. The referendum was supposed to happen in July, but the government took no action, leading American officials to believe it would never happen.
Note that if the Iraqi government really wanted a referendum and a faster U.S. withdrawal, they could have held the vote last month as promised.
Postponing it until January (or whenever the national elections are eventually held) suggests that the main concern is keeping the American occupation alive as a political issue — and thereby distracting attention from the Iraqi government’s ongoing inability to deliver basic services like electricity. It seems Maliki & Co. don’t want to go into that election with their own performance as the primary issue.
Netroots Nation ’09 edition (via Firedoglake — photo by Eli at multi-medium.net).
