Not Worried

I'm worried about a lot, like the future of civilization, President Obama going to West Virginia, paying the dentist. But I am not worried about the 2010 elections. Democrats will do fine.

It's not even May. Absent big surprises--and we do get those--this is apt to be the GOPers high point. The U.S. economy is improving, and unless stuff like the volcano in Iceland force the global economy into the tank, it will be better in the fall. Recovery Act funding of visible projects was backloaded--they'll be kicking in by the fall.


The last U.S. combat soldier could well be switching out the lights behind him in Iraq by summer's end. Afghanistan may even be winding down by fall.

The Rabid Right is dangerous in various ways, but not so much in major elections across the country. The Tea Party is hot media air, not enough to sway elections when other voters are paying attention (says E.J. Dionne, among others.) There are already signs that, contra opinion polls, being against health care is not going to be rewarded by voters--especially independents.

And in case anybody has forgotten 2008, we've got a pretty good campaigner now in the White House. Check out this speech for Barbara Boxer and see if President Obama isn't already sounding resonant themes.

The Democrats will likely lose some seats, especially where they have not very good candidates, and there is enough craziness out there to take away some others. But just as the death of the Republican party announced last year by the media bobbleheads proved a little premature, so today's doom and gloom over Democrats is out of proportion. Dems have a lot of work to do just to stay pretty even, but it's doable. And things for them might look a lot better by fall.

No Win Situations

Update: This devastating piece in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Sportswise, I am not a happy camper, and it doesn't look like I'm going to be one for a long time. The NBA playoffs are beginning, and what was supposed to be a title defense by a dominant Lakers team is starting to look like a slow motion train wreck. Although with all their injuries and fatigue, and the terrible play lately that has given the rest of the league multiple ways to beat them, they may not even get out of the first round. It's that bad. Even if they win against a younger, faster Oklahoma team with a dynamic superstar in the making, it's going to be a struggle and they're likely to look lousy doing it. And even if they struggle all the way through seven game playoff series, they're not likely to beat Cleveland for the championship, if it comes down to that, and it probably will.

But the Lakers prospects are nothing compared to the shocking situation of the Steelers. The last time Steeler Nation rejoiced, it was the touchdown pass from Big Ben to Santonio Holmes that won the Super Bowl. Now the Steelers have practically given away their best receiver because of one off-the-field screwup too many, and their star quarterback is getting a reputation as a star jerk, at best.

Ben's birthday (subject of a post here, I note with some chagrin) was celebrated with some apparently unsavory activity that led to an accusation of rape. Celebrity sports figures are easy targets for false accusations--some Steelers stars have been victimized that way, including (if memory serves) Jerome Betis, and Ben had a pretty good reputation. So I kept quiet until the police investigation was over. Now Ben was not charged, but he's hardly been exonerated of bad behavior. Steeler Nation is not happy with him.

How all this winds up--fall, redemption, whatever--it's going to be messy, and it ain't going to be football. If the Steelers don't trade him (unlikely they will, but possible), he faces suspension in the next few weeks--at first the bet was for a game or two to start the season, but now it may be more. With two stars returning from injury, the Steelers' defense was looking to resume its dominance, and acquisitions and signings suggested that the offense would be somewhat different, but better. Now next season looks like a bust already. The better teams in the division strengthened themselves--in fact, a lot of teams outside Philadelphia strengthened themselves in the off-season. So the Steelers can't afford to lose their star quarterback for four or more games and expect to compete. It looks like another year without a playoff run.

Maybe the Steelers will rise above it all and it will be exciting, and/or the Lakers will return to their dominant form of earlier this season, but neither is likely anymore, and in any case, the road maybe too painful to watch, at least for me and my relatively low tolerance for that kind of drama in something I know I shouldn't be wasting time on. They are all going to be multi-millionaires without me.

The bottom line is that I'm going to have to come up with another way to waste my time. Besides blogging.

The morning after the April 15 Tea Party, a few facts:

Percentage of Americans whose federal taxes are lower this year: 98

Number of years out of the eight years GW Bush was President that taxes for most Americans were higher than now: 8

The Stealth Public Option?

A Kos diarist examining a Kaiser Foundation summary of the health insurance reform law found a provision concerning the health insurance Exchanges that will "Require the Office of Personnel Management to contract with insurers to offer at least two multi-state plans in each Exchange. At least one plan must be offered by a non-profit entity." The "non-profit entity" suggests a kind of stealth public option, though some of the big players--and current abusers--are technically non-profits. However, it probably further ensures that the individual mandate challenge won't be found unconstitutional, if it doesn't require that citizens buy a product from a profit-making company.

Another Kos poster points to several provisions that encourage insurers and the health care system generally to lower costs, and makes health care more affordable.

At the same time, the fact that GOPers smell the possibility of gains in November, plus the one-party vote that passed the bill, is obviously encouraging a continuing opposition by means of lies and extreme rhetoric, and probably emboldens insurance companies to do what they can to subvert the law.

On the other hand, the first congressional electoral test--in which a GOPer tried to inflame and incite Florida seniors on the law, as well as generally insulting the President--didn't work: the Democrat who was supposed to win, did win, with more than 60% of the vote.

The Legal Challenge to Healthcare Reform

There are a number of challenges by politically motivated attorneys-general and governors, playing to larger reactionary forces. None of them have legal merit, let alone real Constitutional challenge. However, the "individual mandate" provision has always been troublesome. If it is the federal government directing every citizen to buy the product sold by a private sector corporation, absent a public option, then it is unprecedented. The closest to it would be state governments requiring automobile insurance, but that is for people who own cars, and citizens are not required to own cars, so they have some choice.

However, this is not how the so-called individual mandate provision was written. As explained by Lawrence O'Donnell, whose expertise is precisely in the area of financial regulations in Congressional legislation, what the mandate basically says is that if you don't buy health insurance, you won't get the tax break that people who do buy the insurance will get. That is clearly within the law and within accepted practice.

Moreover, the IRS will not investigate compliance, but respond to what is on the tax return. I imagine if non-compliance arises in a tax audit, that might be a different story. The IRS has denied the latest Rabid Right scare story, that it is hiring thousands of new agents to monitor compliance.

I still think that an option to buy public plan insurance from the government would more definitively solve this troublesome problem of people feeling they must buy insurance from the same corporate entities who inflate prices, cut coverage whenever possible, and use their money to influence politicians and advertise to drive out competition. But given the compromises in this bill overall, this is an acceptable price at this time for the reforms it includes.

Although I have to admit I say that knowing that it will never apply to me. I look forward to Medicare.

Update: Here's a more detailed explanation of both the insidious Rabid Right lies about this, and the facts.

UConnection

Lesson for the Day: What do you do after you've had the worst first half of the year?

You go get the best second half of the year.

Thanks, UConn and congrats on being NCAA women hoops champs, with your second undefeated season in a row.

April Madness

I spent hours of my weekend watching parts of four Final Four basketball games, so I may as well waste more time noting this fact. Although Butler is a great story, and the Butler v. Duke is the David and Goliath that has the media salivating--if only they had a week to drive it into the ground!--I must admit I enjoy watching the women's games more.

It's partly because their game is a purer style of basketball. But men's college hoops has become a tryout league for the NBA. You have a great freshman season, you're drafted. The same sort of sense of entitlement and egotism you see in the pros is infecting college. The stakes aren't as great for the women yet--the WNBA doesn't pay nearly as much, and fewer college players are likely to have pro careers. So they are playing for the now, and it shows.

The greatest players of any era show you what you've never seen before. LeBron James is doing that now in the NBA. But the Connecticut women are showing it in their NCAA tournament--they've won 74 (or something like that) games in a row, and until Sunday had defeated their opponents by 40 to 50 points. Sunday, the Oklahoma team gave them a real if brief scare at the start of the second half, but UConn took control in pretty short order. They play Stanford for the championship Tuesday, and that's the game I'm most looking forward to watching.

Guess who came to dinner? President Obama's surprise visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Another Major Accomplishment

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton announced a new U.S.-Russia treaty to reduce each country's nuclear weapons by nearly a third.

According to the President: "Broadly speaking, the new START treaty makes progress in several areas. It cuts -- by about a third -- the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy. It significantly reduces missiles and launchers. It puts in place a strong and effective verification regime. And it maintains the flexibility that we need to protect and advance our national security, and to guarantee our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies."

With this agreement, the United States and Russia -- the two largest nuclear powers in the world -- also send a clear signal that we intend to lead. By upholding our own commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we strengthen our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities."

I can't help recalling that President Kennedy made two of his most important speeches--on the nuclear test ban treaty, the very first effort to stop the nuclear arms race--and on Civil Rights, that proposed what eventually became the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts--one day after the other. This immense and important accomplishment days after the health insurance reform law makes for a similarly momentous week for President Obama.

Happy 70th birthday to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. Maybe I'm showing my age as well as my politics, but I think she's hot.

One of those Hell Freezes Over moments, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gives President Obama a big hug, congratulating him for the passage of the health insurance reform bill. But props to her: she fought this fight in the early 90s as First Lady, and she came closer than anyone to pulling it off--until now.

UPDATE 3/24: TPM runs this photo with a story about how the Clintons worked behind the scenes to get health insurance reform passed. Interesting.

Also, there's this interesting observation from David Leonhardt at the New York Times:"For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

Yes, We Did

The dimensions of the healthcare bill victory--and the dimensions of the defeat for Republicans--is just starting to be felt and evaluated. But this E. J. Dionne column is a good start:

Yes, we did.

Finally, President Obama can use those words. The passage of health-care reform provided the first piece of incontestable evidence that Washington has changed.

Congress is, indeed, capable of carrying through fundamental social reform. No longer will the United States be the outlier among wealthy nations in leaving so many of its citizens without basic health coverage.

In approving the most sweeping piece of social legislation since the mid-1960s, Democrats proved that they can govern, even under challenging circumstances and in the face of significant internal divisions. "

Uglier in Our Time

With the top racial slur hurled at a Civil Rights hero and Representative, an anti-gay slur and many threats of violence, the latest Tea Party rally in Washington set a new low in ugliness, hated and incitement.

Here's one report, here's another. Clearly the health insurance reform vote tomorrow is driving the frenzy, but I've given up believing this sort of thing will die down anytime soon. It's uglier, but probably not the ugliest. What remains most alarming is the feedback system that is feeding this frenzy--the hate radio stars whipping up their listeners, the empowered bigots pushing every limit, and the connivance of GOPers in Congress, who are hitching their sinking wagons to this dark star. The question being whether this all ends in self-destruction before it destroys a lot more.

Just a bunch of parents at a school basketball game, rooting for their daughters. It just happens to include the President, the First Lady, the Vice President and his wife. Something heartening about this.

And the 2010 Nader Award goes to...Dennis Kucinich, who announced that he will vote against the healthcare reform bill because it's not good enough for him. If he is the deciding vote against it, he will go down in infamy along with another erstwhile force for good who let ego, image and ideological purity ruin his name forever, when he made the decisive difference in wrecking a decade and perhaps the future, Ralph Nader in 2000. Kucinich's purity will be intact, while those who will suffer and perhaps die because they can't get care due to lack of affordable insurance or who are denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition as defined by insurance companies--well, purity has its cost, as long as you don't personally have to pay it. And as long as you ignore the bill's many progressive elements.

Update: After President Obama held an enthusiastic rally in Kucinich's district, and had a one-on-one with him, Dennis the K changed his mind and his vote, and began to lobby strenuously for the President's bill with his fellow Members. Good for him.

On Thursday, college students throughout California especially, but also around the U.S., protested higher tuitions and costs, and cuts in their education that are sending many institutions of higher education into crisis--including Humboldt State University here in Arcata. So it's not surprising that at least here in the Eureka demo, students were joined by faculty and staff, as departments and entire programs are being weakened and eliminated.

The politics of this is fascinating, and educational. Universities and their students are being characterized as fighting for funds that would otherwise go to the poor and sick, whereas the real priorities being served are wealthy non-taxpayers, mega-corporations and the banks, that are currently mounting a so far successful effort to prevent the U.S. Senate from passing into law what the House has already passed--reforms that would strip the banks of their profitable control of student loans, and would ease the financial burden of students and their schools.

Here's the SF Chronicle story from which this photo comes, and another at the L.A. Times. Neither talks much about the underlying issues. No one much does.

Update: We'll see if this really happens, but at the moment, the legislation to take back control of student loans from the banks is part of the Senate healthcare bill, so if it passes Sunday, this will be law as well.

Happy birthday, Big Ben. Michael Wilmont on PTI said that if he had to pick one quarterback to play a game for his (Wilmont's) life, he would pick Big Ben R. How about that?

How Big Is It? With Update

It's not a Leno (really, a Carson) joke line--it's a question with profound implications for the United States at this delicate moment in human history.

How big is the group of American voters who support the the reactionary-beyond-belief politics, the violently angry far far right?

We know how loud they are. We know that their most extreme views are increasingly embraced by Republican office-holders and aspirants, right up to the leadership in the U.S. Senate.

The latest manifestation is Senator Jim Bunning's ongoing filibuster which is holding up extension of unemployment benefits, affecting millions. As well as other projects that affect the poor and working people. Here's TIME's Joe Klein today:

As this comment from the Number 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, makes clear, the Republicans are turning toward a form of reactionary radicalism that is well to the right not only of traditional conservatism, but also of post-Victorian concepts of government and--not to put too fine a point on it--of common decency as well:

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

The idea that those who have lost their jobs in this Wall Street/mortgage-scam recession are simply deadbeats, choosing to stay on unemployment rather than look for work, seems more appropriate to Scrooge's London than the 21st century. But Kyl has spoken his version of the truth, and we should be grateful for that: this is what the Republican Party is now all about. The America they--and the Tea Partiers--want would have no Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security (just ask the rising Republican star, Paul Ryan, who would privatize them all), no social safety net, no environmental or workplace regulations, no highway or infrastructure building."

Before this spectacle, there was another, that Frank Rich wrote about over the weekend: the sudden embracing by right wing media mouths and politicians of the guy who flew his plane into a building containing IRS offices, calling him a hero. Referring to Times reporter David Barstow's investigation into the Tea Party movement, Rich writes:

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

While Rich cautions that the Tea Partiers and the Republican officeholders have little in common, the officeholders are falling all over themselves to adopt extremist--and violent--rhetoric.

I've seen a lot of explanations of this "anger," not many of them very convincing. The latest is Michael Lind in Salon, who says that the movement is the last cry of a declining demographic group, the white working class, and that groups in decline tend to want to obstruct the change that is overwhelming them and their world. That's more or less been my working theory (though the rest of Lind's piece makes pretty doubtful conclusions and offers impractical solutions.) What makes absolute sense is that there is a lot of racism involved, and not just black and white, but towards everyone who isn't white. President Obama is the obvious center of projection.

Those emotions are being exploited, fueled and guided with their usual subterranean skill, by reactionary corporate interests, while shameless GOPer politicians are all too obviously trying to ride the wave.

I get all that. I still don't know though how big it is. It's a declining minority (racist whites) of a declining soon-to-be minority (whites). But if you listen to Hardball or CNN, you get the impression that this unhinged anger at Obama and Washington is very big. CNN in particular is promoting the idea, citing its poll that claims that 56% of Americans believe the federal government threatens their freedom.

Here's what I do know: an awful lot is being deduced from one election in MA, which some folks up there think was due largely to state politics. And poll questions of such a general nature bring together people who are never going to actually vote the same way. There are lots of ways to interpret "broken government." Maybe it's Obama to some, maybe it's Republican obstructionism in the Senate to others.

I do think a certain unhinged quality, a mindless lashing out, a feeling of helplessness and general anger, is probably real, and rooted in fear. But all kinds of fear, by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

How big is it? is in the end a political question, that elections will settle (without necessarily addressing the question directly.) It may be that Jim Bunning is leading the political equivalent of the Terry Shiavo moment, that was followed by hefty GOPer defeats. We just don't know yet. But if healthcare doesn't pass, this is going to grow.

But there's another important question: how dangerous is it? That doesn't always depend on size. Given the right circumstances, you'd have to say that right now: dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.

Update: The Southern Poverty Law Center issued a new report on Tuesday that quantified growth of right wing extremist groups--at 244% rise in the number of these groups in 2009.

O Canada! Congrats to Canada for the overtime win of their Olympic men's hockey team that won them the Gold over the Silver medalists, the U.S. Winning goal by Sidney Crosby, of the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins. (You know I had to get that in.)

Health of the Debate

The patient is resting uncomfortably, and the patience is wearing thin. And though opinions differ on the immediate effect of the the 7 hour healthcare session of members of Congress presided by the President, my reading of the reactions suggests that the President and the Democratic plan came out healthier, though the length of the process and the number of players probably diluted the kind of clear exposure of the GOPers bad faith, hypocrisy and game-playing that happened when President Obama met with House GOPers.

Still, even the New York Times' right-of-moderate columnist David Brooks--who appears not to favor the Obama plan--gave credit to the President. After admitting that the event was more meaningful than he expected, he wrote:

Most of the credit goes to President Obama. The man really knows how to lead a discussion. He stuck to specifics and tried to rein in people who were flying off into generalities. He picked out the core point in any comment. He tried to keep things going in a coherent direction. Moreover, he seemed to be trying to get a result. Republicans had their substantive criticism of the Democratic bills, but Obama kept pressing them for areas of agreement."

For other press/blog responses (with selections towards the positive) check the beginning of this blackwaterdog diary on Kos.

On substance, objective fact-checkers supported what President Obama said, and agreed that GOPers routinely distorted numbers and facts. So did Paul Krugman in his opinion piece, and then he pointed out:

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable."

As for "the Republican plan," Krugman translates the findings of the Congressional Budget Office: But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now."

Once again, the differences could not be more stark, and so you have to wonder what is really going on in the Zietgeist that makes these reforms controversial. On the face of it, there should be overwhelming public support, since the vast majority of Americans are paying exorbitant amounts for weak coverage that insurance companies can disappear at their whim, and are mostly paying for mega-corporations to establish monopolies through acquisitions and lobbying.

Against this, President Obama kept coming back to the stories of real people, who aren't among the income elite. And so did Rep. Louise Slaughter, one of those admirable public servants who voters have wisely sent back time and again, so she has institutional memory and can recite history that she has seen from the inside, like what happened with the Clinton attempts, and what the price has been for that failure in the 90s--especially in an area that no one talks much about, the economic burden on companies of health insurance, which has had a hand in making exporting products so expensive that they become uncompetitive--and so the American car manufacturing business was essentially disappeared to a large extent because of health care costs.

But Slaughter also told of a woman who was using her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford not to. How can this happen today in America? Slaughter asked, and that's the question that is answered by the Zeitgeist and what happens to this bill.

Krugman concludes:

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right. But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform. "

David Brooks doesn't think it will happen, and no one is predicting an easy road. Apparently a lot will depend on conservative Dems and whether they believe they have enough political cover, which depends in part on whether they sense the public is behind this. That's probably why the GOPers kept talking up polls which they claim say Americans aren't. We could talk about courage and doing the right thing. It's not unknown in Congress, though it's hardly the rule. But some sense of justice in health care probably will depend on it, and maybe it should.