Stooge (D-ND)

Sherrod Brown sez that, contra Rahm Emanuel, no Democrat will vote with Republicans on a filibuster to kill the health care bill, even if it includes a public option.

Brown should go have a talk with Kent Conrad (D-ND). Ezra Klein just did, and I don't know how he got through it without banging the telephone against his ear until it hurt. That Conrad displayed an unconscionable ignorance, as well as an arrogant belief in his own falsehoods, would be normal if he were a teabagger attending a town hall. That he's a Democratic United States Senator fills me with nothing so much as fear.

Conrad raised eyebrows this week when he told the Senate Finance Committee that the health care systems of countries like France, Japan and Germany should be models for the United States because they aren't "government-run systems," even though the government intrusion into those systems is far greater than anything this country is contemplating, even with a public option. Conrad got this from a book he read over the weekend, T.R. Reid's "The Healing of America". That's right, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, a leading voice on the Finance Committee and a member of the Gang of Six, who has been working on health care for months if not years, JUST DECIDED to look into how other countries around the world manage their health care systems.

Klein started by asking Conrad what he was talking about with respect to France and Germany:

But that runs over some fairly large variations. In France, for instance, the insurance really is government-run. The vast majority of people are on public insurance, and there's private supplementary insurance atop that. So too with Japan. They're not confined to simply subsidizing the poor.

But it's not government-run. The doctors and hospitals are private. You're right that in France there's more of a government involvement beyond providing money for those who can't afford coverage. There's a regulatory involvement in terms of what's required by the plans. But the plans themselves, the mutuals, are not government.*

You're talking about France here? Not Germany?

Both of them. The intermediaries are not-for-profits. The model is universal. Employers contribute. Reid says we are in part a Bismarck model, where employers contribute. Part which is that Beveridge model, like the Indian Health Service and the Veterans Health Service. We have a national health insurance model with Medicare. And then out-of-pocket for people with no coverage. We have a real mixed system. We really don't have a system. That's kind of what you get down to.

Klein puts an asterisk there, kindly not telling Conrad on the phone that he's totally full of it. Basic insurance in France is provided through a government program called Social Security. The mutuals only deal with supplementary private insurance.

Conrad segues into the "innocent bystander" approach to policymaking, renouncing his status as a US Senator and just marveling at how the universal "we" balk at changing the health care system:

But we decided not to change that much. The real lesson from Reid's book is that we do this badly. If the French came up with a great new medical procedure, we wouldn't say that's just some French procedure. We'd adopt it. But when they come up with a better way to do health care, we dismiss it as French, and inapplicable.

Yeah. We don't want anything to do with it. He talks about that in the book. It's an odd thing.

Sure is! If there were only a US Senator who praised T.R. Reid's book, who could draw a lesson from it about acting boldly and not getting caught up in nonsensical American exceptionalism! Wherever could we find someone?

After some talk about Medicare and the Clinton 1994 plan and the Gang of Six ("We had 61 meetings!"), Klein moves to the public option, and here Conrad reveals his true grievance:

Do you support the public option?

No.

Why?

I go back to the T.R. Reid book. I don't think a government-run plan best fits this culture. A plan that's not government-run has the best chance of succeeding in being passed into law.

Second, and this is very important to my thinking, the public option as defined by the committee of jurisdiction in the House, the Ways and Means Committee, is tied to Medicare levels of reimbursement. My state has the second-lowest level of Medicare reimbursement in the country. If my state is tied to that reimbursement, every hospital goes broke.

People say, "Just fix it." I've been on the Finance Committee more than 15 years. I've been trying to fix the unfair aspects of Medicare reimbursement all the time. We run into the House. Membership is determined by population, and the big population states write levels of reimbursement that unfairly treat hospitals in states like mine. My hospitals get one-half as much as urban hospitals to treat the same illnesses.

What about a public plan that can't use Medicare rates?

There are discussions going on about that. Obviously, it would be very important that it would be clear that it's not tied to Medicare levels of reimbursement. Those of us in low-reimbursement states would have our health infrastructure put at risk.

For all of Conrad's talk about "uniquely American systems" and "not fitting the culture," what Conrad wants is a full-on handout for providers in his state. He wants the Medicare reimbursements to go higher for North Dakota. There's probably a point where they get high enough that he can tolerate the government intrusion. He's essentially calling for a bribe.

And mind you, this is the deficit hawk chair of the Budget Committee, whose entire goal in health care reform is to "bend the cost curve." Now, raising reimbursement rates for rural areas would, of course, INCREASE HEALTH CARE COSTS across the system. But Conrad thinks it's terribly unfair to his doctors to get less than urban hospitals to treat the same illnesses. Has anyone asked Conrad about the cost of living in North Dakota as opposed to New York City?

Then, Conrad whines about that damn House of Representatives where "membership is determined by population," as if the majority should be allowed to rule or something!

Conrad, of course, is also protecting his boomer baby idea of co-ops, which he pulled out of thin air after meeting with the CEO of UnitedHealth Group. Blue Cross of North Dakota, which covers 90% of the market in Conrad's home state, would qualify as a non-profit to be a co-op and receive millions in seed money. Again, payouts are the goal here. Klein asks Conrad why the co-ops in the Finance Committee bill are so weak, leading to this incredible exchange:

I was also struck when I read the chairman's mark that the co-op option seemed shackled. It couldn't sell to large employers. It couldn't set payment rates. The co-ops are not public. But they were being prevented from competing with insurers on a level playing field. It seemed like private insurers were being protected from competition.

I think there are things I would like to see that would make certain co-ops be given the full ability to compete that others are.

So you would like to see those restrictions lifted.

I would.

Why are they there?

Because that came out of the Group of Six discussions.

I have no words.

OK, I have a couple. The Group of Six discussions FELL APART, and yet the useless co-op plan, which Conrad admits he does not like, still comes out of the language from those meetings. Why? I'd have to guess that Conrad doesn't care that the co-ops won't work, as long as Blue Cross of North Dakota gets their seed money.

This guy is CENTRAL TO HEALTH CARE REFORM.

Weep for America.

Another Country Brought Low By Afghanistan

The United States has the majority of forces in Afghanistan. And any examples of civilian casualties or comically obvious election fraud reflects badly on the lead occupying nation, particularly their effort to fight a counter-insurgency campaign in service to an illegitimate government. But the NATO strike that left dozens of Afghans dead last week was called in by German forces, and because they have national elections coming up, they are being held accountable for their presence in the country. We could see Germany as the first in the coalition to crack.

The episode has been a debacle for NATO forces at a time when efforts are under way to reduce civilian casualties from airstrikes. It has also exposed rifts between allies over different approaches to fighting the war in Afghanistan, and has added to pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government ahead of elections on Sept. 27.

At a news conference on Monday, a Defense Ministry spokesman, Thomas Raabe, laid out the German case in an unusually lengthy account of the surveillance and intelligence that led a German commander on the ground to conclude that armed Taliban were near the tankers and that the fuel trucks could have been used in an attack on German or Afghan positions [...]

The episode has brought to the surface long-simmering tensions between NATO allies. The United States and Britain, for example, have griped that Germany was shirking its share of the fighting.

German leaders, for their part, believe that their efforts have been considerable in light of the widespread pacifism among Germans after World War II and the opposition of the German public to a continued military presence in Afghanistan. Germany has about 4,200 troops in the country.

If the elections end badly for the ruling coalition, Germany's going to bug out. Their rules for engagement are painfully narrow anyway. And this bombing incident just makes things more difficult. The situation in Afghanistan is becoming close to untenable.

...I don't know what a partial recount will accomplish, when credible reports show hundreds of thousands of falsified ballots. Counting them again won't do anything, and in throwing them all out you would disenfranchise the lesser numbers in places like Kandahar whose ballots are mixed in with the fraudulent ones. The election commission has tossed 153,000 ballots so far, but the end result is a fake election, based on the capriciousness of the commission. Which means someone's faction will be upset with the final result. I don't think you can run a fair election in Afghanistan at this point, which is part of the problem for a NATO coalition trying to engage in nation-building.

Europe's Dangerous Lag

You may have heard about the Czech Prime Minister making a bizarre rant against President Obama's spending policies, calling them "a road to hell." It turns out that the Prime Minister already faced a no confidence vote in the Czech Republic, where their right wing is far closer idelogically to US Republicans. So that's not really a big issue. The far bigger issue is Europe's persistent resistance of any stimulus measures for its countries, which could be partially due to their generous social welfare states, meaning that the people are less dramatically impacted (so far) by the crisis.

The Europeans say they have no need for further stimulus right now because their social safety nets, derided in good times by free market disciples as sclerotic impediments to growth, are automatically providing the spending programs that the United States Congress has to legislate.

Europe’s extensive job protections and unemployment benefits are “bad in the upswing, because firms don’t dare to hire people, because then they are glued to them,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich. “In the downswing, it’s good if the people are glued to the companies. They keep their jobs. They keep their income. They keep consuming.”

The Wall Street Journal has more. Certainly Europe's citizens have to be thankful for these "automatic stabilizers" that kick in to protect them, keeping them solvent and able to spend. At the same time, Paul Krugman argues that the automatic stabilizers have been exaggerated from a macroeconomic perspective, and the European response still comes up short. According to James Surowiecki, Europeans are simply more concerned with hyperinflation than they are with increasing economic growth, and the social safety net is being used as more of a cover story.

European economic policy seems to reflect the conviction that inflation, not stagnation, is the greatest threat to an economy. If the episode that haunts the U.S. is the Great Depression, in Europe, where the Germans have been dominant in shaping economic policy, the defining historical moment is the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, when prices rose more than seventy-five billion per cent in just one year, 1923, and, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “trust, calm, and health” vanished. The legacy of that episode lives on not just in German policymakers’ inflation phobia but also in their sense that there is something fundamentally distasteful about debt. For Germany, fiscal rectitude even in the face of a crisis is not just economically sensible but morally correct.

There’s a price to be paid for hostility toward fiscal stimulus and easy money: Europe and, arguably, the world will take longer to recover. But European policymakers seem willing to weather this outcome in exchange for stability. They’re also probably counting on the fact that, even as they sit tight, their economies will get a boost from the American and Chinese stimulus packages. The thing about government spending is that it “leaks”: a good chunk of our stimulus package will buy other countries’ goods. So Europeans can avoid getting too deeply into debt and still reap some of the benefits of our borrowing. This is unfair: in effect, Europe is refusing to carry its share of the global economic burden and is piggybacking on us. But it’s hard to see how things could have turned out otherwise. The U.S. economy, much more than Europe’s, is like the proverbial shark: if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies (or at least creates a lot of misery). In some sense, we need economic growth more than Europe does. It’s not surprising that we’re going to be the ones who end up paying for it.

I don't think European policymakers are wrong at all - it just reflects a different philosophy. But at a time when coordinated global action may be needed, hopefully they won't be so resistant to meeting the moment. Ezra Klein reports that they won't, quoting Martin Wolf about Germany: "They will act, but only on the doorstep of Armageddon. Not a second before."

Cash For Trash

One of the developments that drove the market this week was the news that GM wouldn't need any further financing from the government in March. Which is great. But the reason wasn't that auto sales bounced back to life. It was that they have been able to extract more blood from the stone than they expected.

G.M., the nation’s largest automaker, issued a statement saying that it had told President Obama’s auto industry task force, which is reviewing the restructuring plan that the company submitted last month, that its March financing request “would not be needed at this time” because it was making more progress than expected in reducing costs.

The statement did not specify whether G.M. still expected to need the full $30 billion that it had requested.

“This development reflects the acceleration of G.M.’s companywide cost reduction efforts as well as proactive deferrals of spending previously anticipated in January and February,” the statement said. “G.M. will remain in regular contact with the presidential task force on the auto industry on the status of G.M.’s restructuring actions, its liquidity position, timing of future funding requests, and other relevant topics of mutual concern.”

What is missing in that report is the selling of cars. They can cut as deep and hard as possible, and force their union to knuckle under as well, the way Ford did this week. Ultimately, that will reduce wages across the industry, and in the non-union shops as well, as everyone races to the bottom. But again, the problem is that nobody is selling any cars.

I think we should seriously consider the German "cash for trash" model:

Amid the gruesome headlines generated by the world's auto industry these days, it almost read like a typo: new car registrations in Germany rose 21% year-on-year in February, the country's Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) announced March 3. This, though, was no error. The 278,000 cars put on the road, crowed Matthias Wissmann, VDA's president, amounted to "the highest level of sales in the month of February for ten years."

Why the splurge? German drivers have latched onto a juicy new deal. Under a scheme started in January, car owners who trade in a vehicle more than nine years old for a new, greener model can expect $3,172 from the German government as well as a break from paying road tax for at least a year. Similar "scrapping schemes" have been launched in recent months in France, Italy and Spain. Now motor manufacturers in Britain are pleading with its government to follow suit.

You can do more to fight global warming by improving performance at the low end than by giving everyone who has a moderately efficient vehicle a Prius. A "cash for trash" scheme would do just that by dramatically increasing the fuel economy of the overall American fleet, with the added benefit of jump-starting sales for the moribund auto industry. There's legislation on this, and seeing how Germany and other nations are using this plan to boost their own homegrown industries it would be in no way protectionist to do the same for the Big Three. If you want to sell cars, subsidize the overhaul of the fleet.

Nice Trick

I guess conservative bloggers are pitching a fit because Obama didn't pay his respects to the troops at Landstuhl AFB in Germany. That might be because the Pentagon nixed it.

I've just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama's canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn't visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks [...]

It's unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon's directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon's directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.

Bottom line: We're not seeing any issue here at all.

This of course, won't stop anyone, including McCain, from making it an issue.

It is a nice trick by the supposedly apolitical Pentagon, however. Allow Obama to plan a trip to the Air Force base, then lay down the rules at a time when Obama has no choice but to cancel it, and then watch the political fur fly.

Good work.

UPDATE: This Daily Kos diarist has a lot more (apparently McCain visiting troops at US Naval bases with campaign staff wasn't a problem). And then there's this:

Utah Army National Guard Intelligence Officer (i.e.,. spy) reportedly authors chain email defaming Obama

The new chain email claims, incorrectly, that Obama blew off the troops waiting to shake his hand at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan so he could shoot hoops instead (was the alleged Intell Officer trying to imply a racist smear against Obama as well? You know those black guys and their basketballs...). In any case, the Army came out and denied the veracity of the email - Obama didn't shoot hoops, and he did greet the troops - but screw that, where is the denial from the Intell guy? I want to see him declaring that he didn't write the email and that it's factually untrue. If our spy didn't offer the anti-Obama smear, then wouldn't you think the military would have mentioned that right at the beginning of their denial?

Just as importantly, if the author of this phony smear is an Army intelligence officer - read: a US spy - then there is some serious potential illegality with him using his professional disinformation spycraft in an attempt to influence an American election. Remember, it was just yesterday that State Department employees in Berlin were told not to dare show up at Obama's speech, lest they appear to be weighing in on our elections. So how do you think a US spy using his spy talents to influence our elections falls under the rules?

You take each one of these by itself, maybe it's nothing. But they're starting to add up. Funny how all of these "nonpartisan" military brass seem to be weighing in on the election on precisely the same side, isn't it?

Walking Gaffe Machine

Is it the self-assuredness or just the ability to rely on the compliant press that enables John McCain to bust out all these misstatements on a daily basis?

Adding to the total today is the idea that Iraq was the first major post-9/11 conflict... boy, I knew that the GOP forgot about Afghanistan, but I didn't know they TOTALLY forgot about it.

And then he tried to deflect Barack Obama's successful speech in Berlin today by saying that "I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States," apparently forgetting the events of a month ago:

However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada -- to the Economic Club of Canada -- in which he applauded NAFTA's successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain's trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign.

I could loop in the persistent and damaging reports about Randy Scheunemann working in close contact with Bush Library briber Stephen Payne on influence-peddling schemes, too.

If I were McCain I'd just pack it in and follow the route of William McKinley's front-porch campaign - never leave the office or the homestead, and for God's sake don't open your mouth anymore.

This Moment

Take a look at these pictures and you recognize that something is very different about this Obama campaign and how restorative it can be for our relationship with the world.





There's limited value in this iconography in and of itself, but clearly Europeans are excited to have an American leader with whom they might work in concert. And the speech was very good in its own right, a message that weaved Obama's personal history, the kinship between the United States and Germany dating back to the Berlin Airlift, and how that kinship - a multilateral coming together of nations - can meet the challenges of this century and triumph over them.

Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations – and all nations – must summon that spirit anew.

This is a simple call for a foreign policy that respects allies and listens to the breadth of opinion; that moves forward with humility but with the common purpose to share wealth, reward work and stand on the side of restoring this planet's resources and protecting the human rights of all citizens; and that makes a profound call for the end of a world with nuclear weapons, which, incidentally, I don't remember ANY other Presidential candidate doing since the invention of the atomic bomb.

The current President, meanwhile, banned State Department officials from attending the speech. And the other guy running for President had lunch at a German restaurant. Only one of the three attempted to lead today.

I agree with Meteor Blades. This is now the benchmark for how an American leader conducts himself on foreign soil.

Greg Sargent has some other good analysis.

UPDATE: Yes, Ezra is right to mention the inordinate amount of time spent in the speech on the Berlin Airlift, a story recounted in Andrei Cherny's new book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour. I think the reason for that is that it was an example of the exact opposite foreign policy of the Bush Administration - showing how we can best our adversaries by raising to our highest ideals, by helping people rather than harming them. If this is the model for an Obama foreign policy I'm all for it.

The Value Of Police Work

2 German nationals (not Arabs, but converts to radical Islam) and one Turk have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism charges in Berlin. They had apparently horded 1,500 pounds of explosive material similar to that used in the London transport bombings, and were reportedly planning to potentially hit American military facilities like Rammstein AFB in Frankfurt.

This was the culmination of a long investigation by diligent German intelligence services and law enforcement personnel. If our 160,000 or so American troops now serving in Iraq were investigating terror ties and financing and embedding as human intelligence in training camps, etc., etc., do you think we'd be safer? I do.

The point is that diligent law enforcement is a key component of stopping terrorist actions. Having a bunch of troops policing a civil war in Iraq is never going to stop German terror cells from forming. Never. The connection would be absurd on its face. Also, some of these guys apparently received training in Pakistan, which is now a harbor for terrorists despite being an American ally. Indeed just yesterday there was a deadly terrorist attack in the Pakistani capital. We have ceded our national security to a weak South Asian despot, who's looking to possibly declare a state of emergency in order to save his autocratic rulership.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, said that while a complete military takeover under martial law had been ruled out, a state of emergency that would allow for the postponement of elections for up to a year and the curtailment of individual liberties was still on the table. "Martial law is a very harsh word," Hussain said in an interview. "Emergency rule is not so harsh."

So we have a possible martial law-in-all-but-name in Pakistan (way to promote democracy), a safe haven for terrorists in that country (so much for "you're either with us or against us"), and law enforcement and intelligence being the only thing stopping terror attacks around the world (so much for "going on the offense" only meaning militarily)...

There's one other thing here. European countries who have done a terrible job dealing with Muslim immigration have radicalized those populations through their policies. By setting them apart from true citizenship, by putting up barriers to jobs and socialization, they have given poor, angry, young Muslims nowhere to turn but the mosque, and frequently that mosque is a radical one. This is the exact opposite of our current immigration policy in the United States. Muslim populations here have the highest degree of assimilation anywhere in the world, and for this reason there are comparatively very few of these kinds of legitimate terror cells. Yet there is a group that would have us revert to European-style immigration standards that would marginalize and radicalize populations in our country. They're called the Republican Party.