There they go again, the Greedy Old Pigs fighting for the right to protect their Sugar Daddies with back room deals. Reid should accept their conditions, then secretly tape the proceedings and release the results via a leak during the election cycle. Can you imagine what juicy nuggets these evil dimwits would let slip? Could keep the Dems from losing some seats.
Thanks to Matt Yglesias yesterday for making the argument that my modest donations to John Edwards’ presidential campaign weren’t a total loss:
Repeatedly throughout his campaign, Edwards served as a useful progressive foil. He was never really up there with Clinton and Obama, but he was always close enough that they couldn’t simply ignore the possibility that his efforts to appeal to the base would work. So when Edwards unveiled his four point plan for achieving universal coverage—a plan based on exactly the pillars of ObamaCare—it made a huge difference and swiftly became the benchmark by which Clinton and Obama were judged. . . .
. . . The see-saw of the political expectations game is such that by the Spring of 2010 many people had convinced themselves that this approach to health care was a disappointing sellout. But back in the Spring of 2007, it was considered radical—a left-wing idea by the standards of a Democratic presidential primary. . . .
. . . Three years ago, few thought it was politically realistic. Tomorrow, it will be signed into law. But the whole thing easily could have never been taken up if not for the pressure Edwards put on others to shift in his direction.
Swearing, yelling and flipping off reporters, Hillbilly Senator Jim Bunning carries on a one-man battle against extending unemployment benefits. Seriously Senator? I tell you what, if you feel so strongly about it, let’s just exclude benefits to Kentucky! Come on Reid, don’t cut off his mic, cut off his Federal dollars spigot!
Meanwhile fellow Hillbilly Senator Lamar Alexander suffers either from an excess of hypocrisy or senility as he decries using the reconciliation process to pass legislation that the party of the minority plans to filibuster.
Why the hell are my tax dollars going to fund the folks in the states these idiots represent?
*Update* This just keeps getting worse! Democrat-in-Exile sent me this tip: Redneck Asshole Senator Inhofe is trying to intimidate climate scientists with McCarthyite witch-hunts.
Barbara O’Brien of Mahablog fame asked to post on Needlenose. Happy to post anything that bashes Confederates, particulary of the reactionary persuasion, so here goes:
Recently I wrote here that Mississippi has the worst health care in the nation. Now I want to tell the story about how desperate Mississippians, abandoned by their government, turned to Iran for help.
Bt first, I want to tell you about Mississippi’s infant mortality rate. The rate of infant mortality is the number of infants who are born alive but die before their first birthday, per 1,000 live births. In other words, if infant mortality is 5, that means that 5 of every 1,000 babies in that population will not survive the first year of life.
According to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated infant mortality rate in the United States for 2009 is 6.22, which is high for an industrialized democracy. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the infant mortality rate in Mississippi is 11.4. Only Florida is worse, at 14.1. By contrast, the infant mortality rate for Washington and Minnesota is 5.1.
Now, here’s where Iran comes in — according to the Times of London, last October “five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi” to advise Mississippians how to lower their infant mortality rate.
This exchange came about when James Miller, managing director of Oxford International Development Group, was consulting in a rural Mississippi hospital. “He was shocked to find that the state had the third highest medical expenditure per capita, but came last in terms of outcome,” the Times article said.
Miller remembered a conference presentation on how Iran radically lowered its infant mortality rates. Facing a shortage of doctors and hospitals, the government launched a program of “health houses” staffed by local people trained to be health workers. The health workers are authorized to provide basic medical services such as diabetes monitoring as well as prenatal and obstetric care. Infant and maternal mortality rates both fell dramatically as a result.
James Miller contacted Iranian doctors to find out if their program might be applied to Mississippi. So the Iranian doctors came to Mississippi to give advice. Although the idea of following an Iranian model was a hard sell in Mississippi, at least one community has begun work on an Iranian style “health house” to provide better care for pregnant women abandoned by Mississippi’s health care system.
Dr Aaron Shirley, who worked with James Miller on the Iranian project, admitted they were staying under the radar. Mississippi government officials, including Governor Haley Barbour, were not involved or informed.
This takes us back to the issue identified in the earlier post — Mississippi has the worst health care in the nation, but as far as Gov. Barbour is concerned, this is not a problem. The governor is perfectly clear, on his website and in public pronouncements, that Mississippi fixed its health care problems by passing a comprehensive tort reform bill in 2004. The 2004 law affected all kinds of personal injury lawsuits in Mississippi.
In the U.S., state after state has passed “tort reform” laws that make it harder for citizens to file personal injury suits and also limit the amount of damages they can receive. This is a critical issue for people with asbestos-related disease such as mesothelioma cancer, who so often need damage awards to care for themselves and their families. “Tort reform” also is being pushed by conservatives nationwide as the way to fix the nation’s health care crisis.
But Mississippi reformed tort in 2004, and it still has the worst health care in the nation. What did Governor Barbour “fix,” exactly?
-Barbara O’Brien
Just assume a kayak and 2,756 miles' worth of stamina, and you're there!
Speaking of Fubar (as Green Boy was just below), about a month ago he passed along an off-site remark about Google Maps providing “driving directions” from San Francisco to Hawaii — including the awkwardly roundabout need to kayak from Washington state across the Pacific. My reply, based on that week’s progressive disappointment in the White House, was that President Obama must have used similar software in figuring out his escalate-in-order-to-withdraw strategy in Afghanistan.
Little did I know that despite my terminal procrastination in posting about that topic, the same half-hearted snark would be appropriate with regard to the state of healthcare reform… and even that requires a large quantity of optimism.
As you undoubtedly know by now (um, unless you’ve been depending on this blog to keep you informed of breaking news developments), separate reform proposals have passed in the House of Representatives and the Senate — with the latter bill’s benefits so thoroughly diminished that whether it’s any improvement at all over the present system is a matter of fierce debate in the progressive blogiverse. In fact, Obama himself is under intense criticism for having exerted so little visible effort to avoid the legislative emasculation that occurred in the Senate.
In Obama’s defense, though, this is a situation that he apparently planned for early on in the year, as Brian Beutler reported for TPM back in August:
Dick Durbin (D-IL), the number two Democrat in the Senate, says President Obama wants to move forward with some form of health care bill quickly, and then fight the fight over particulars in negotiations with the House of Representatives. . . .
“… we are trying to walk this tightrope to get this bill through. The House [of Representatives] is likely to include it [a public option]. The Senate may not. Then we go into conference committee and President Obama has to roll up his sleeves and see if he can bring us all together. And when I’ve spoken to him about this a couple times, all he’s said is: ‘Get me to a conference committee. Let me bring these folks into a room, and let me work and get it done.‘”
Okay, so the Democrats in Congress have gotten healthcare reform to a conference committee, as Obama claims to have wanted. Indeed, in his own comments on the subject, the president echoed Durbin’s language:
“… we hope to have a whole bunch of folks over here in the West Wing, and I’ll be rolling up my sleeves and spending some time before the full Congress even gets into session…. I intend to work as hard as I have to work, especially after coming this far over the course of the year, to make sure that we finally close the deal.”
The question is, rolling up his sleeves to do what? Conventional wisdom has already hardened that whatever comes out of the House-Senate negotiations will be essentially identical to what passed the Senate (even if that bill is at least slightly improved over its worst incarnation) — lest it fall prey again to the unpredictable whims of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman as they threaten to join a Republican filibuster.
It seems like daydreaming at this point to imagine that Obama could move the bill in a more robust (and progressive) direction, then finally mount the bully pulpit, using the inherent popularity of a “public option” and similar features to pressure the centrist corporatist Dems into allowing a simple majority vote. And yet, Obama’s speech to Congress in September showed that he could move the needle of popular opinion on healthcare reform, if only he cared enough to try.
Another possibility is the strategy that Nate Silver outlined a couple of weeks ago:
… the idea is to “surprise” the Senate by unexpectedly introducing additional provisions under reconciliation once you’ve already got the main portion of the bill passed. Does this sound attractive to you? Well then, the best thing to do would be topass the bill as is now, since that is the first step in the strategy. To repeat: the most promising application of the split-bill/reconciliation strategy involves passing what you can now — not killing it.
Silver sees this as also being unlikely, but it was also proposed by wonk-blogger Mark Schmitt back in July…
Use the 60-vote Senate to pass whatever they can pass now — we liberals will grumble but live with it — and then use reconciliation next year to fix it. With the exchange structure and subsidies established, it wouldn’t be hard to add an employer mandate, which would save money. With the rudiments of even a weak public plan in place, it wouldn’t be complicated to expand it and modify its eligibility rules, in ways that might save or cost money but in either event, involve budget changes to an existing program rather than creating something new. Aggregating small changes over the next few years (on the model of the steady expansion of Medicaid engineered by Henry Waxman and others over the 1980s and 1990s) could non-controversially build the kind of robust and equitable system we dream of.
… and Sen. Tom Harkin, a public option supporter, hinted at it two weeks ago (“We have to get this bill passed, and then we’ll come back and revisit the public option at some point.”)
Assuming the House and Senate finish making their legislative sausage by Obama’s “State of the Union” address to Congress, wouldn’t it be something of a political masterstroke for the president to announce a plan to strengthen and complete the watered-down bill by passing an expansion of Medicare using budget reconciliation rules? That would be a classic example of doing the hard, unpleasant work during the off year, and delivering the most popular aspect of reform right before the 2010 elections.
If Obama lacks the chutzpah to even try that, instead settling for the cautious, least-resistance path of accepting whatever meager reforms the Congress will pass on its own, then he deserves whatever he gets — in terms of public opinion and a demotivated base going into the 2010 elections — for his failure to lead. Just standing by and watching as others do all the rowing isn’t enough; at some point, the president has to grab an oar, too, or we’ll never get anywhere.
So, the Obama administration got a wake-up call suddenly concerned on Thursday about the health care reform drubbing it was taking in the progressive blogiverse, and held a conference call to try to stop the bleeding:
White House senior advisor David Axelrod and health care adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle held a conference call Thursday night with progressive bloggers — in what Axelrod described as a bid to clear the air after several tense days.
… In response to one blogger who chided the White House for failing to fight for the public option while taking “potshots” at the liberal activists, DeParle said: “The president is fighting for this. … You have no idea how many hours, how many hundreds of hours he has spent, how many phone calls he has made, how many meetings he has had. … We need your help and we don’t mean to be chiding you. But please appreciate how hard this is.”
… According to an account on DailyKos, DeParle said the provisions in the Senate bill need to be improved and moved closer to what the House bill includes, particularly on affordability.
Awww, I feel all warm and fuzzy now. They like us, they really like us after all! Except someone had to go and step on the (revised) message right away (via the Wall Street Journal):
Turn off MSNBC. Tune out Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann. The White House has its liberal wing in hand on health care, says White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel….
… Emanuel pointed to a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman and another coming from National Journal writer Ronald Brownstein pressing for passage of the Senate health bill. “What you’re seeing is the progressive backlash against the progressive backlash,” he said.
Nice going, Rahm. Whatever small amount of goodwill the Axelrod-DeParle call created, you just undid it. The boss must sure be glad he has you as his political mastermind.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
The Dems have rebranded themselves as the Spineless Whimp Party, or Whimps for short.
*Update 12/14/09* Senator Tom Harkin grows a spine – will he be expelled from the Whimps?
Some encouraging news via the Washington Post today:
President Obama is likely to endorse using a portion of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout for a new jobs creation program during a speech about the economy next week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Friday morning.
“The president thinks we should and must do everything in our power to create an environment for job growth and job creation,” Gibbs said. When asked whether Obama will talk about the use of TARP funds on Tuesday, Gibbs said, “I think that’s likely.”
About $139 billion of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, remains unallocated and available to the administration. Banks have paid another $10 billion in interest and dividends to the Treasury and returned about $71 billion in aid, the Treasury reported in November. This week, Bank of America announced it would repay its $45 billion package.
As recently as this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said he wants to dedicate much of the unspent TARP money to reduce the national debt. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) and other top Democrats have been crafting a jobs bill that would tap the bailout program. The size of the repayments from once shaky banks may make it possible to accomplish both goals.
. . . Gibbs said the president is likely to talk about multiple ideas for job creation, some of which would require congressional approval. The Tuesday speech at the Brookings Institution follows a day-long jobs summit Thursday and a trip to Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday to highlight the plight of workers.
This weeklong focus on creating jobs is a refreshing sign that Obama and his top advisers did not, in fact, forget all of their political skills shortly after taking office.
Matt Yglesias adds that the President may be remembering a thing or two about basic messaging as well:
… once Obama’s Allentown event got into the Q&A section it got really good. What was interesting about it was that everything Obama said was so banal. It was elementary, back-to-basics, “I’m a Democrat” kind of stuff… He wasn’t even really all that feisty. But he got out and talked basic politics—who’s on your side, who’s fighting for change, and who’s responsible for protecting the status quo.
In other words, Obama is rediscovering the importance of the fundamental things that got him elected.
There’s a massive element of political calculation involved here, obviously — not just a president taking action to stop the downward drift of his poll numbers, but the Democrats in general needing to provide a positive political message going into 2010.
Even if the stimulative impact of whatever “jobs bill” gets passed is relatively small, much of the money from last spring’s economic-recovery package is still due to be spent this coming year. Giving voters a fresh reminder that Democrats took action will be important for them in taking credit for whatever improvement occurs in the job market, regardless of the cause.
But at least this is the good kind of political calculation… the kind that comes from elected officials realizing they’re accountable for producing positive results for the people who put them in power. Frankly, we could do with a bit more of it.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Come on Senator Reid, you milquetoast – you can’t play nice with scoundrels - it’s time for the nuclear option.
*Update 11/25/09* The Nation agrees
