Professional Jealousy

Because Glenn Beck had the foresight to get out in front of an anti-government movement that does not fall neatly along left-right lines, movement conservatives are lashing out at him:

Beck added that McCain would be worse than Obama:

"I think John McCain would have been worse — [laughs] How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?"

Beck’s opinion elicited a fierce and angry response from right-wing radio host Mark Levin yesterday. “To say [McCain] would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact,” Levin said on his radio show. He then suggested Beck is playing politics: “I don’t know who people are playing to. I don’t know why they’re playing to certain people.”

Levin never mentions Beck by name (he refers to Beck as “the 5 pm’er” because Beck’s show airs at 5 pm on Fox News). He concluded with this final dig at Beck:

"I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic."

Levin's right, to an extent. Beck has no coherent worldview, and his de facto leadership of the Ron Paul movement - which he came to very suddenly after expressing contempt for it - is nothing short of opportunistic. And it's killing his competition - Joe Scarborough, Peter Wehner, The American Spectator, even Rush Limbaugh. They're jealous of his attention, his opinion leadership. The fact that the knives came out after the TIME cover story is not coincidental.

But there's something a little more interesting at work. While Beck is a mess from an intellectual standpoint, and his bashing of Republicans is little more than cover, at least a part of the movement he's positioned himself at the front of doesn't have a worldview that falls into any ideological box. Sure, corporate forces aligned with the movement GOP are trying to co-opt it and steer it to business-friendly ends, and the protest audience is as variegated as any would be on the left. But there's an element in there that is not easily defined:

In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.

But all that said, there are some identifiable -- and plainly valid -- underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That's when conventional political language ceases to be useful.

Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties' establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom -- the Ron Paul faction -- objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these "tea party" protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

I don't think, in the end, that it's supposed to make sense. Politics has a tribal component and is waged much like sports fans wage their battles against one another. There will always be a sizable audience for a polemicist, whether viewed as partisan or non-partisan, especially when his or her attacks always seem to fall on the Democratic occupant of the White House. But I think Beck's unpredictability, as well as his reaches into the depths of wingnuttery - wait until the Christian conservatives figure out Beck chose to be a Mormon - frighten the establishment in the GOP. They tolerate him when he's whipping up a frenzy against Obama, but he could just as easily call to break up the banks - whatever he thinks will make him a ratings point - and suddenly the clean ideological lines break down.

Now, if there was a coherent Democratic Party which would argue for the virtues of government and its role as a protector of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and the common good, the ideologies of the parties would be a little cleaner, and the DC establishment wouldn't be such an inviting target. In a way, Democrats have brought this on themselves. They invented a Glenn Beck by failing to make the case for government themselves. And as a result, distrust of government is rising.

There's Something Happening Here

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, the voices of those giving testimony to the essential immorality of the broken health care system have become prominent, and the desires of the defenders of the status quo exposed.

Witness the changing tenor of town hall meetings, which changed from meeting spaces for teabaggers and Larouchies to venues for powerful expression. See this video of a woman desperate for help in a nightmare system, where her husband's insurance company has denied him coverage for a traumatic brain injury, and Rep. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) incredible response, that her neighbors (who I guess are all speech pathologists) can help her. This is made all the more insane when you know that Coburn is a doctor:



And we're starting to see real emotion and anger on the side of reform, too, like at this John McCain town hall:

Why don’t I have the health insurance you’ve got! Because I’m paying for it! And I’m paying for the President of the United States’ health insurance and Congress’ health insurance. Why don’t I have that! I’m your employer! I’m your employer! You work for me, and you’ve got a better health insurance plan than I’ve got!

McCain later evicted an angry woman who wouldn't let McCain get started. And she was indicative of many in the crowd, some who yelled about how much money McCain pocketed from insurance companies over the past year.

But I'm more interested in the series of personal stories popping up in the media, as individuals share their own crises navigating the broken health care system. Here's Cynthia Tucker in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Having just relocated to Washington, I have to find a new pediatrician for my infant daughter. I sought recommendations from several acquaintances, and the same name came up repeatedly. (I’ll just call her Dr. Amy.)

I called Dr. Amy’s office and was given an immediate appointment. But I was also told she is “out-of-network” for Aetna.

Called Aetna. They explained I would pay several hundred dollars a year extra for the privilege of taking my baby girl to Dr. Amy.

So, I called another pediatrician who is “in-network.” She said she could see my baby at the end of October.

I have a choice to make: Pay through the nose for a highly recommended doctor who can see my baby immediately. Or, go to the doctor my insurance will pay for, which would mean my child would run months behind on her vaccination schedule. This isn’t a disaster, but it is certainly frustrating.

That's a minor inconvenience compared to this expose on the Remote Area Medical tent in Los Angeles last week:

The LA Forum, the arena that once hosted sell-out Madonna concerts, has been transformed – for eight days only – into a vast field hospital. In America, the offer of free healthcare is so rare, that news of the magical medical kingdom spread rapidly and long lines of prospective patients snaked around the venue for the chance of getting everyday treatments that many British people take for granted.

In the first two days, more than 1,500 men, women and children received free treatments worth $503,000 (£304,000). Thirty dentists pulled 471 teeth; 320 people were given standard issue spectacles; 80 had mammograms; dozens more had acupuncture, or saw kidney specialists. By the time the makeshift medical centre leaves town on Tuesday, staff expect to have dispensed $2m worth of treatments to 10,000 patients [...]

Along the hall, Liz Cruise was one of scores of people waiting for a free eye exam. She works for a major supermarket chain but can't afford the $200 a month that would be deducted from her salary for insurance. "It's a simple choice: pay my rent, or pay my healthcare. What am I supposed to do?" she asked. "I'm one of the working poor: people who do work but can't afford healthcare and are ineligible for any free healthcare or assistance. I can't remember the last time I saw a doctor."

And then this must-read from David Goldhill in The Atlantic, hardly a left-wing rag:

ALMOST TWO YEARS ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy [...]

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

As Goldhill comes to realize, the system is rife with distortions, where every stakeholder's economic interests clash with the public interest of quality and affordable care for all. And what's more, everybody knows it, even if only intuitively.

As August fades, people are starting to see the forces of the status quo as nothing more than a sham, and starting to reconnect with their own struggles in the health care system, struggles which suggest that it needs fundamental change. The question is whether Congress will listen.

The McCain-Lieberman Show Is Back

If it's Sunday, it's two discredited Senators who should be irrelevant.

John McCain continued his dominance over the Beltway discourse yesterday by demanding that Obama drop the public option from his health care reform bill. That would be a precondition to Republican support, says McCain, despite the fact that Republicans have throughout the process showed no inclination to support a contention from Obama that the sky is blue and water is wet, let alone anything to do with health care. It's a brilliant strategy to try and fork Obama between his base of supporters and conservative Democrats in Washington, but on the merits it's a completely silly idea.

At least McCain's partner in crime, Joe Lieberman, is more honest. He doesn't want health care reform because... he doesn't want health care reform.

In case you were wondering, Joe Lieberman said this morning on John King's show that we need to concentrate on cost controls in the health care sector in order to bring down the deficit and forget about universal coverage. We just can't cover everyone, but we have to figure out a way to cut costs dramatically because health care is bankrupting the country.

Considering that Lieberman doesn't understand that universal coverage with everyone paying in will mitigate health care inflation, and that he considers cost control the most important thing, one can only assume that he's the guy who wants to off granny --- and you too, if you don't have insurance. After all, we know that people who aren't insured get some very expensive, inadequate care if they do get sick because we require that hospitals treat people in an emergency. If cutting the deficit is the point of health care reform, then you've got to go where the money is --- sick people.

Lieberman and Richard Lugar both agree that Obama shouldn't have put Health Care on the agenda at all because there is a recession. But, of course, if the recession was over you couldn't put health care on the agenda because Lieberman and Lugar would say it would hurt the recovery. And if the economy is rolling, everyone who is willing to work should be able to get covered, so there's no need for health care reform. It's funny how that works.

Later, Lieberman actually tried to use the civil rights movement as a model for doing almost nothing on health care this year. Now, Lieberman has, throughout his career, traded off his image of being a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s. I wasn't aware that, when he was in Mississippi signing up black people to vote, his goal was to do nothing substantial for a while until the country became more comfortable with black people. If so, he'd have been the only Freedom Rider with such a mentality. I think the "justice delayed is justice that's fine with me!" crowd had only one member.

The wanker caucus in the puffed-up US Senate is verging on a majority. And of course, that's the problem, one which Ross Douthat, of all people, comes close to nailing. Conservative Democrats really don't want to do much of anything with their majority, even though the cost of doing nothing could be fatal.

What’s more, health care reform is the Democratic Party’s signature issue. Its wonks have thought longer and harder about it than any other topic. Its politicians are vastly better at talking about the subject than Republicans: if an election is fought over health care, bet on the Democrat every time. And for all the complexity involved, it’s arguably easier to tackle than other liberal priorities. It’s more popular than cap and trade, it’s less likely to split the party than immigration and it’s more amenable to technocratic interventions than income inequality.

If the Congressional Democrats can’t get a health care package through, it won’t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress’s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.

You'd think that the instinct for self-preservation would be some kind of impetus to getting something done. So far, it hasn't emerged.

Self-Immolation

John McCain goes on national TV this weekend and talks about his party's problems with Hispanic voters, how there's "much work to be done" and how Sonia Sotomayor is a great American success story. One day later, after claiming to be undecided, he comes out against Sotomayor, claiming that she's "an activist judge who legislates from the bench." Ian Milhiser does a great job showing how conservative activism on the Court is basically repealing the 20th Century.

Repealing the Twentieth Century: In three opinions that read like a tea-bagger’s wet dream, Justice Thomas would have restricted Congress’ power to enact economic regulation to a point unheard of since the Great Depression. A short list of laws that would simply cease to exist in Clarence Thomas’s America includes “the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws.”

Selling Justice To The Highest Bidder: Roberts, Thomas and Alito all joined dissents arguing that a West Virginia coal magnate could literally buy a judge for $3 million to overturn a verdict against his company.

Corporate Immunity From the Law: Joined by Roberts, Alito wrote a dissent arguing that drug companies have almost-total immunity from the law when one of their dangerous products caused a former professional musician to lose her arm and her ability to play music. Roberts, Thomas and Alito also joined a majority opinion giving sweeping immunity to the makers of dangerous medical devices.

Massive Resistance: All three justices joined a radical opinion which not only held that it is unconstitutional for school boards to desegregate public schools, but which audaciously cited Brown v. Board of Education for this proposition.

This Election Brought to You By Wal-Mart: Perhaps most ironic of all, all three of McCain’s justices are poised to declare McCain’s signature legislative accomplishment, campaign finance reform, unconstitutional.

McCain voted for all of the judges leading that charge. In fact, he's voted to confirm EVERY SINGLE JUDGE in his Senate career except for Sotomayor. And that's the larger point. Republicans are so in hock to their right-wing base that they must risk a generational divide with Hispanic voters by voting against a qualified Latina judge:

Most Senate Republicans say opposition to Sotomayor is a principled stand based on the belief that her public speeches reveal a personal bias in her judicial philosophy. Republicans have cited her views on Second Amendment cases, speeches she has given during her time as a federal judge and a key ruling on affirmative action -- all issues that are of sharp interest to conservative-base voters.

But some senators and Republican strategists worry that efforts to shore up support from conservative voters who dominate the GOP primaries could become a missed opportunity to extend an olive branch to Latino voters, who gave just 31 percent of their ballots to McCain last fall.

If you look at the demographic shifts of the country, both with age and ethnicity, you'll see that this is just suicide. But I'm not about to get in the way of it.

The Unknown War With India

The President had a big victory this week when the Senate voted to strip funding for additional F-22 fighter jets, which the Pentagon and the Air Force didn't want, which haven't been flown once in Iraq or Afghanistan and which are apparently vulnerable to rain. It was a small step toward breaking the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. The lobbyists were out in force to keep this alive, and a lot of lawmakers who have parts of the F-22 made in their district wanted to keep the gravy train going, but eventually, sanity prevailed. The military budget is increasing this year, and eventually we have to end a circumstance where we spend more on the military than every other country in the world combined, but if we couldn't cancel the F-22, we would not be able to cancel pretty much anything. So it was a good step toward lessening the power and influence of military contractors. Robert Farley has a great roundup of opinions.

Naturally, John Cornyn (Bugfuck Crazy-TX) doesn't agree. In fact, he thinks we have to use the F-22 to counter all sorts of threats. Including... India.

"It's important to our national security because we're not just fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," Cornyn says. "We're fighting -- we have graver threats and greater threats than that: From a rising India, with increased exercise of their military power; Russia; Iran, that's threatening to build a nuclear weapon; with North Korea, shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting American soil."

I wasn't aware that we were at war with India. In fact, I don't get over there much, but I'm pretty sure we're an ally. In fact, Hillary Clinton just spent four days there this week. We just completed a civilian nuclear power agreement with them last year.

I guess being Republican means "never having to say you're sorry to an allied country for calling them an enemy." Remember when John McCain thought we were at war with Spain?

Throwing Elbows

This was a nice little move by the White House against blowhard Jon Kyl and St. McCain:

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that the $787 billion stimulus package “hasn’t helped yet. … What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”

The next day Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from four Obama administration officials — Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar — pointing out the billions headed for Arizonans. LaHood wrote:

"The stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know."

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) quickly fired back on Tuesday, saying that he “strongly support the comments of Senator Kyl and call[s] on the administration to retract its threat against the citizens of Arizona.”

What McCain calls a threat I call "asking the Governor of Arizona if she wants to do what her junior Senator suggests." In other words, following right-wing policies is a threat against American citizens. Now I agree with that, but it's funny for John McCain to agree.

If Republicans want to say that all government spending is bad they should be able to live with the consequences. But they never do, of course. Good for Obama and the White House for pushing back.

...Here's another Democrat, Bernie Sanders, forcing Republicans, including John McCain, to confront their own rhetoric.

Sanders: I don't want to shock anybody here, and have people dashing out of the room, but the VA is a socialized health care system, right Mr. McCain? That's what it is. That's not public insurance, but socialized medicine.

McCain: Not exactly my description, but...

Sanders: OK. And, you know, the VA has its problems, we all know that. But by and large, I think it's fair to say, when we go home, we talk to our veterans, you know what, they feel pretty good about the VA [...] All right, that's socialized medicine in the United States of America, anyone want to bring an amendment up to eliminate the VA? I would suggest the chairman accept that amendment. I don't hear too many people.

Beautiful.

Arnold's Crusade Against Legislators For Committing The Crime Of Legislating

The Sacramento Bee committed an act of journalism today, taking a look at the consequences of the legislature failing to act on various bills in favor of solving the budget.

Merced County beekeeper Gene Brandi says he had enough problems before getting ensnared in the nasty war of words between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over California's failure to cure its staggering budget deficit.

His Gene Brandi Apiaries in Los Banos, which once produced 400 drums of honey a year, has turned out just 20 drums so far this year as a searing drought has deprived wildland plants of the nectar that bees turn into honey.

And Brandi says he is facing competition from food processing companies that market sugar-added honey products as the real thing. "We've got people who take advantage of the good name of honey to try to sell their product," he says.

Now some agricultural producers and Democratic lawmakers say Schwarzenegger and his aides are unfairly exploiting the good names of honey, blueberries, pomegranate juice – and cow tails – to bash legislators for fiddling while California burns.

The dust-up stirs debate over whether the budget mess should freeze out all other matters – or whether lawmakers still have a responsibility to continue the business of legislating, no matter how mundane it can appear.

Did this guy really ask to be turned into a punchline by the Governor? I would argue that the crap that large multinational food producers package and sell as food is a serious problem on a variety of levels, not the least of which is public health. And given 120 legislators with different committees and responsibilities, we are perfectly able, even with a budget crisis, to deal with additional legislation, particularly that which can make a difference to small businesses and the health and safety of the entire state. In the past several years, with budget woes in every single one of them, somehow we passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors, an increase to the minimum wage, a landmark smart growth bill, and the Global Warmings Solutions Act, just to name a few.

Ol' Stogie And Jacuzzi is guilty of the exact same crime of turning every program that sounds funny, that includes animals or food, into an object of derision, as John McCain when he discussed so-called "pork" in the stimulus package:

McCain's method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anythign that sounds silly. He's clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain's twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. ...

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” ...

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don't know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it's a boondoggle. I don't know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there's a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative -- it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don't know this, and they don't care. What's on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Who could have expected that going with a chief executive this simple-minded could lead us to such a place of ruin?

You Probably Think This Song Is About You

Watching these Republicans yipping like a bunch of chickadees about revolution in Iran from the safety of their offices in Washington is starting to infuriate me. First off, these people don't have much of a clue about who they are supporting - Mir Hossein Mousavi supports the same nuclear program Ahmadinejad supports, and he is a true heir to the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini (I actually think he would still be an improvement, and could liberalize the Islamic Republic from within - but let's get real, we're not talking about making Dennis Kucinich the leader of Iran, as Obama recognized in an interview yesterday: "The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual positions may not be as great as has been advertised.") Second, they seem to have no sense of the consequences of their actions, brilliantly summarized by Les Gelb:

"Republican leadership calls for Obama to condemn Iran's election results and speak out for the demonstrators shows no knowledge of Iran whatsoever. If he did so, America would become the issue in Iran, not Ahmadinejad, and we would become the excuse and justification for spilling Iranian blood.

"These sniping remarks by Republican leaders also shows they put pandering to their right wing above American national security. Why can't they listen to their own real foreign policy expert -- Senator Richard Lugar -- and see and say that the U.S. must exercise restraint in our public statements for Iran's sake and our own."

Iran will likely complain about American intervention anyway - but the White House shouldn't give them a reason to do that, instead making them look paranoid and foolish in the eyes of their people. John Kerry gets this right:

Mr. McCain’s rhetoric, of course, would be cathartic for any American policy maker weary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hostile message of division. We are all inspired by Iran’s peaceful demonstrations, the likes of which have not been seen there in three decades. Our sympathies are with those Iranians who seek a more respectful, cooperative relationship with the world. Watching heartbreaking video images of Basij paramilitaries terrorizing protesters, we feel the temptation to respond emotionally.

There’s just one problem. If we actually want to empower the Iranian people, we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference. Iran’s hard-liners are already working hard to pin the election dispute, and the protests, as the result of American meddling. On Wednesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry chastised American officials for “interventionist” statements. Government complaints of slanted coverage by the foreign press are rising in pitch.

We can’t escape the reality that for reformers in Tehran to have any hope for success, Iran’s election must be about Iran — not America. And if the street protests of the last days have taught us anything, it is that this is an Iranian moment, not an American one.

In other words, Sen. McCain, Rep. Cantor, Rep. Pence, et al: SHUT YOUR PIEHOLES. The best way to help the Iranian people is to stay out of it. And you don't have to believe me, but practically every Iranian dissident and reformer who has had the occasion to say two words about this.

What does Ganji think of President Obama’s statements about Iran? “From my perspective, Obama has so far said he won’t meddle in Iran’s internal situation, and that’s a good, good approach,” Ganji said, but he added, “He cannot stay silent on human rights issues.” Clearly, Ganji thinks the Obama administration isn’t striking the right balance between non-intervention and humanitarian concerns. But that’s not to say that more active American support is welcome:

“Bush’s policies toward Iran and the Middle East were completely wrong. The result of Bush’s policy, it led to Iran gaining strength. Mr. Obama is trying to change the policy. If we can separate two points, we can actually drive to a good policy. First, Iran’s path to democracy and the people’s movement to democracy is for the people of Iran. No foreign country, either America or any other, should get involved in that process.

“Secondly, human rights is an international condition. When a country denies human rights for its own people, the entire world should punish that government. So the people of Iran will not want anyone to get involved in that. But what they expect from the world is to protest an Iranian regime from a human-rights perspective. This is a policy which I stand by.

“The Iranian people are saying the Ahmadinejad government is a coup d’etat government. They’re asking that no government accept the legitimacy of his government. This is what most people want, for no government to work with the Ahmadinejad government.”

We can delineate between being forceful on human rights and overtly calling for the overthrow of a foreign government. We learned the lesson with Bush that his belligerence strengthened the regime to the point that they thought they could get away with a stolen election and a brutal crackdown. The situation in Iran is by no means settled - the government and the Revolutionary Guard could react with extreme violence. But certainly, calls from the peanut gallery in the US aren't exactly helpful.

The Way Health Care Can Die

The news that the White House will push for a public insurance option for health care is welcome, and I believe a direct result of the line in the sand from the Progressive Caucus, conditioning their vote on a robust public plan. That completely changed the debate and allowed activists to engage. All well and good.

But there was quite a bit more in that Obama letter to Senate Democratic leaders on his vision for health care. Here's the key bit, for me.

At this historic juncture, we share the goal of quality, affordable health care for all Americans. But I want to stress that reform cannot mean focusing on expanded coverage alone. Indeed, without a serious, sustained effort to reduce the growth rate of health care costs, affordable health care coverage will remain out of reach. So we must attack the root causes of the inflation in health care. That means promoting the best practices, not simply the most expensive. We should ask why places like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and other institutions can offer the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm. We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our country. That's how we can achieve reform that preserves and strengthens what's best about our health care system, while fixing what is broken [...]

I understand the Committees are moving towards a principle of shared responsibility -- making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and asking that employers share in the cost. I share the goal of ending lapses and gaps in coverage that make us less healthy and drive up everyone's costs, and I am open to your ideas on shared responsibility. But I believe if we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable. If we do end up with a system where people are responsible for their own insurance, we need to provide a hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot afford it. In addition, while I believe that employers have a responsibility to support health insurance for their employees, small businesses face a number of special challenges in affording health benefits and should be exempted.

Health care reform must not add to our deficits over the next 10 years -- it must be at least deficit neutral and put America on a path to reducing its deficit over time. To fulfill this promise, I have set aside $635 billion in a health reserve fund as a down payment on reform. This reserve fund includes a number of proposals to cut spending by $309 billion over 10 years --reducing overpayments to Medicare Advantage private insurers; strengthening Medicare and Medicaid payment accuracy by cutting waste, fraud and abuse; improving care for Medicare patients after hospitalizations; and encouraging physicians to form "accountable care organizations" to improve the quality of care for Medicare patients. The reserve fund also includes a proposal to limit the tax rate at which high-income taxpayers can take itemized deductions to 28 percent, which, together with other steps to close loopholes, would raise $326 billion over 10 years.

I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC's recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

Let's take a look at all of this. First of all, on the individual mandate, I'm glad he said that makes no sense if individuals cannot afford the coverage, and that he'd provide a hardship exemption. Hopefully this will spur Congress to devise the most affordable plans possible.

Obama and his team have foregrounded the importance of cost control, arguing that the long-term health care budget projections are unsustainable without reform, and that we must bend the cost curve while providing greater access (the whole "entitlement reform is health reform" thing). I'm all for efficiency and putting our dollars to the best use and comparing medical effectiveness so that we don't pay more money for a less effective treatment and all of that. But Obama also seeks fiscal austerity in this package in the short-term in addition to reining in costs over the long-term. He wants the package to be deficit neutral, in other words paid for, over the next ten years. That means the money has to come from somewhere. It didn't for two wars, TARP, and a whole host of other things, but for health care, you have to pay up front.

The $635 billion he's talking about includes the capping of charitable deductions that was DOA as soon as it reached Congress. And $635 billion is not all of what's needed. Senate leaders have talked about limiting the employer deduction on health benefits, and while Peter Orszag took it off the table, Obama seemed to be open to it, even though he campaigned hard against John McCain when he proposed eliminating the employer deduction. Obviously, there's a difference between McCain's plan, eliminating the deduction while offering a meager tax credit to individuals to fend for themselves, and this plan, limiting the deduction to raise money for providing subsidies and building a public option, etc. So there is a difference. But it may not be enough to convince Congress, and you can see the "he's taxing your health benefits" commercials now.

Let's replay that other piece of the letter:

I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC's recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

You can pretty reasonably read that and come up with the idea that Obama wants to pay for health care by cutting back on the enormously popular Medicare program. The truth is a little murkier, but only a little.

For example, Medicare Advantage truly sucks - the government overpays private insurers for the same treatment received inside Medicare. But what's all this about "reducing Medicare spending"? And what's MedPAC? Ezra Klein explains.

You probably haven't heard of MedPAC. Most people haven't. It stands for The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and it's an independent congressional agency formed in 1997 to advise the Congress on matters relating to Medicare. The commission is staffed by experts who are appointed for three-year terms, and its existence is due to a simple insight: Medicare payment policy is too technical for the Congress. There aren't five senators with an informed opinion on the "equipment use standard" for imaging machines, much less 50, and much less 100.

Every year, MedPAC releases a "report to the Congress on Medicare payment policy." The report contains acres of analysis (this year's "assessing payment adequacy and updating payments in fee-for-service Medicare" was particularly thrilling) and a final chapter on recommendations. The recommendations tend to be smart, aggressive, reforms. The sort of reforms experts agree are needed, but interest groups effortlessly stymie. The recommendations don't, in other words, matter. None of it does, really. The report sits on a shelf.

But what if it didn't? What if MedPAC had power? [...]

The theory is that it would act as a Federal Reserve for Medicare. "Congress has proven itself to be inefficient and inconsistent in making decisions about provider reimbursement under Medicare," said Rockefeller. "Congress should leave the reimbursement rules to the independent health care experts.”

That's the plan Obama spoke of favorably in yesterday's meeting. But what hasn't been reported is that senior administration officials are also considering another variant: This plan would package MedPAC's yearly recommendation and fast track them through Congress for a simple, up-or-down vote. No filibuster. No changes to the package of recommendations. Health reform, under this scenario, would become a yearly legislative project.

The idea is that reforms to Medicare would spread across the industry and cut costs. The idea is that the people who understand health care can provide some order on the current chaos, and with added power can force changes in the system that will reverberate and cannot be subject to interest-group vetoes. Health care policy experts like it, lobbyists and conservatives don't. They will call it the dreaded rationing. They will say that Congress is coming to take your Medicare away.

But what has MedPAC hisotrically proposed? I've got past recommendations here and here. They're written in bureaucrat-ese, but they include raises in reimbursement rates along with reductions, and the vague "updates" in payment rates for certain services. Seeing that these are experts, and that trusted sources are calling their recommendations smart and sound, I'm willing to believe that for now.

Still, the politics of this stink on ice. Given the reality that health care must be paid for in the short term, I see lots of reasons for lawmakers of both parties to have problems with just about every kind of revenue-raiser imaginable. They'd knock down sin taxes. They'd knock down caps on charitable deductions. They'd knock down limiting the employer deduction. In the end, the pool of money needed becomes unattainable. And then we have this proposal to allow unspecified reductions to Medicare and Medicaid spending, with a board of experts empowered to do so, and I'm wondering if anyone passed that by anyone with political insight. Because it will get trounced in the court of public opinion.

In many respects, I'm more hopeful about the prospects for health care reform than ever. In other respects, I'm completely in despair. As we get further in this debate, we will find that nobody in Congress wants to pull the trigger on paying for this, and the Medicare cuts are so ripe for demagoguery that Harry and Louise will look like a Care Bears commercial by comparison. And I feel that progressives aren't even paying attention to the most important contours of this debate.

The Dark Side

I thought this was a known known, but WaPo treats it like a scoop - Dick Cheney sat in on CIA briefings about torture in 2005.

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials [...]

The CIA made no mention of his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every lawmaker who had been briefed on "enhanced interrogation techniques" since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw those briefings was "not available."

Several members of Congress who took part in the Cheney meetings declined to comment on them, citing secrecy concerns. But there was little doubt that he was leading the charge on the issue.

"His office was ground zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day," recalled Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who jousted with Cheney over the system of interrogations.

As Greg Sargent notes, you can just go ahead and throw those CIA documents right in the garbage. Enough errors have been found in them that I could write up something more plausibly just by going through old blog posts.

Remember what was going on around 2005. Republicans on the Hill were revolting after allegations of torture started reaching the mainstream. Lindsey Graham and John Warner and John McCain wanted to ban the practice. Democrats were calling for a full-scale investigation. These sessions, as I read them, were basically designed to keep the Republican caucus on board with the policy. They were in charge of Congress at the time, and they could shut down any probes into the torture regime. You can see that at work in the one briefing described at length:

One of the most critical Cheney-led briefings came in late October 2005, when the vice president and Porter J. Goss, then director of the CIA, read Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) into the program on the interrogation methods, according to congressional and intelligence sources.

One knowledgeable official described the meeting as contentious. Cheney and Goss, with other CIA officials present, tried to persuade the former Vietnam POW to back off an anti-torture amendment that had already won the support of 90 senators.

The McCain amendment would have ended practices such as waterboarding by forbidding "cruel, degrading and inhumane" treatment of detainees. The CIA had not used waterboarding since 2003, but the White House sought to maintain the ability to employ it.

In the meetings with lawmakers, Cheney was adamant that the enhanced interrogations were needed to preserve national security, according to two participants. He advocated briefing more lawmakers about the program, against the wishes of National Security Council officials who sought to inform only the top members of the intelligence committees.

Lawmakers at times challenged Cheney and CIA officials about the legality of the program and pressed for specific results that would show whether the techniques worked. In response, the CIA briefers said that half of the agency's knowledge about al-Qaeda's plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations.

In case you needed more evidence that the CIA lies to Congress. Just the fact that they hid Cheney's involvement in these briefings is an example of that.

Marcy Wheeler reports on a couple other interesting parts of the story:

First, the WaPo reports that Jello Jay pushed for an investigation, but Pat Roberts quashed it. I guess that explains why Roberts is so quiet now. But in case anyone wanted any more affirmation that Democrats opposed torture and Republicans sustained it, there's yet one more data point.

And then yet another Gitmo trip for Addington, this time with some Senators in tow. Was this an all-Republican affair as well? The question is particularly relevant, since Lindsey Graham has helpfully reminded us that all these Republican-only briefings are proof of criminal intent. Or was it just Graham, McCain and the few other anti-torture Republicans, off on a field trip to be coerced by Cheney's right hand man?

If anyone needed yet more proof that torture was Cheney's baby, his active lobbying of Congress--hidden as "CIA briefings"--ought to do the trick.

Hopefully the Post will develop this angle in future articles. For now, we know that Dick Cheney was the torture lobbyist, he worked with the CIA to shut down any investigation, and the CIA lies to Congress.

But How Do You Pay For It?

Today the Speaker of the House vowed to bring a health care bill to the floor of the House by the end of July. The movement is all in the direction of a bill. The question, as always, is how this gets funded. Max Baucus has smartly asked for the health care industry bigwigs who vowed to cut costs by $2.5 trillion dollars over a decade to put it in writing, arguing to include in the bill enforcement of their otherwise voluntary effort. But ultimately, that money will not be available to policymakers as they seek to fund health care reform. They will need to find their own revenue streams. And that is a daunting task, as David Leonhardt explained today.

Providing health insurance to the roughly 50 million people without it will cost something like $120 billion a year. President Obama has proposed $60 billion or so in new revenue for this purpose — a “down payment,” his advisers say. But Congress seems set to reject about half of the down payment (a plan to limit high-income families’ tax deductions for charitable giving and other such things). That makes for the $90 billion health care hole.

And no one is quite sure how to fill it [...]

The experts at the round table — liberal and conservative — actually agreed to an impressive degree about the best way to fill the hole. They urged the senators to limit the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance.

The deduction may seem a wonderful thing, but it isn’t. It benefits the wealthy more than anyone else. It encourages employers to overspend on health insurance, because $100 in untaxed medical benefits is more valuable to workers than $100 in taxed income. And, as Mr. Baucus said, the deduction has a certain Willie Sutton appeal for Congress: it’s where the money is.

The government forgoes $250 billion a year in taxes because of the deduction. Capping it, to apply only to reasonably priced health plans, would bring in enough money to fill most of the $90 billion hole.

As the article goes on to say, this was an approach then-Senator Obama excoriated John McCain for during the campaign. The difference is that McCain wanted to eliminate the employer deduction, not cap it; and he offered nothing in return, whereas Obama is offering expanded access and subsidies for anybody who can't afford insurance, as well as cost control and guaranteed issue and community rating and all the other elements of reform. So there is a difference, but "they want to tax your employer health benefits" will be a familiar refrain.

I've seen possibilities like taxing high-calorie sodas or alcohol or cigarettes as a kind of "health tax" to help pay for this. There's also the option of deficit spending to put it in place, passing off on the funding for future years, but that's probably a dead letter among the Blue Dogs. If you wrap those cost controls expected from the industry inside the legislation, the CBO might give you a better break on scoring, so that's another option.

Overall, I think the movement is in the right direction, but the cost hurdle could easily derail the whole thing. While I consider the public plan important, funding will ultimately be the make or break piece of the deal.

Obama Needs To Step Up And Help Repeal DADT

I highly recommend this segment on the Rachel Maddow show with Dan Choi, a gay veteran and Arabic linguist now being thrown out of the military after coming out on an earlier Maddow program. This is the system that John McCain considers to be "working well." At a time when the military has been forced to loosen their recruitment guidelines to allow admittance for 42 year-olds and the mentally ill, 13,000 members who want to serve have been discharged because of who they choose to love in their personal lives. It's a needless violation of these men and women's dreams and career goals, an unnecessary intrusion into their lives, and a costly policy that doesn't improve unit cohesion or readiness in any way.

Here's Dan Choi discussing his removal from the Army:

CHOI: Well, when I got the letter, I was extremely angry. I was angry -- I mean, the letter is basically saying bottom line, Lieutenant Dan Choi, you're fired. You're a West Point graduate, you're fired. You're an Arabic linguist, you're fired. You deployed to Iraq, you're willing to deploy again, doesn't matter. Because you're gay, that's enough grounds to kick you out.

But the biggest thing that I'm angry about is what it says about my unit. It says that my unit suffered negative good order -- negative actions -- good order and discipline suffered. That's a big insult to my unit.

I mean, all the insult that the letter can do, to say that I'm worthy of being fired, you know, that's nothing comparing to saying that my unit is not professional enough, that my unit does not deserve to have a leader that is willing to deploy, that has skills to contribute.

Choi plans to fight the policy, an opinion he apparently shares with the President. Yet Obama has shied away from meaningfully committing to overturning the policy. He keeps fussing with the language on his website, advocating not a "repeal" but a "change" of the policy. Plus, he could end implementation of the policy and essentially put a moratorium on all discharges right now until the policy review is completed and Congress takes action. I understand that Obama must be looking at the model of Bill Clinton, who came out for full participation of gays in the military in 1993 and eventually had to accept this policy, and he doesn't want to make the same mistake. But there will never be a "good time" to repeal DADT. At some point, leaders lead, and while Eugene Robinson mainly talks about gay marriage in this piece, the exact same statement could be made about DADT:

Before his inauguration, President Obama called himself a "fierce advocate of equality for gay and lesbian Americans." Now, with the same-sex marriage issue percolating in state after state and with the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy ripe for repeal, it's time for Obama to put some of his political capital where his rhetoric is [...]

It seems to me that equality means equality, and either you're for it or you're not. I believe gay marriage should be legal, and it's hard for me to imagine how any "fierce advocate of equality" could think otherwise.

Obama sensibly advocates the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." He should press the case by publicly reminding opponents of letting gays serve openly in the military that their arguments -- it would hurt morale, damage cohesion and readiness, discourage reenlistment -- are often the same, almost word for word, as the arguments made 60 years ago against racial integration in the armed forces. It was bigotry then, and it's bigotry now.

Obama should also make the obvious case that forcibly discharging capable, fully trained servicemen and servicewomen for being gay, at a time when our overstretched military is fighting two big wars, can only be described as insane.

Congress needs to act to fully repeal DADT, and Rush Holt, among others, have committed to that option. One of them is, interestingly enough, Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired Navy Admiral talking about primarying Arlen Specter in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. While Sestak may be moderate on a few issues, he has always been out front on the issue of DADT repeal.

SESTAK: First, Lieutenant, thanks for your service to our nation. And I think this is indicative of the kind of quality of man and woman that we have lost. Look, I went to war, and we knew by survey that when I went to war that we had a certain percentage in that carrier battle group, and when I was on the ground briefly in Afghanistan, that were gay. And now we come back to America and say they don't have equal rights. I've never understood it. This is something where we have to correct this. It's just not right.

MADDOW: When the president says, Admiral Sestak, when he says that it could be slow going in part because it has to move through Congress -- and again, we know this because he wrote it in a handwritten letter to somebody who is currently being kicked out of the military, as Lieutenant Choi is -- he's essentially saying that Congress will be part of the reason that this needs to go slow. But you're saying that this could actually happen quite quickly.

SESTAK: I think it could, yes. I think the president as commander in chief needs to be the one that says to the military -- and I understand what Secretary Gates said recently about the plate is kind of full -- that's not the Defense Department's decision. This is the commander in chief's decision to say we need to change it, which he has [...]

And I know there's several of us veterans here -- Patrick Murphy, Eric Massa, myself, you know, warriors, veterans, like the lieutenant, that want to, as Ellen Tauscher, who is the primary mover of this, goes off to the State Department, that we can pick it up as co-sponsors, and hopefully rapidly move it. If it's a law, I think we should do it by due process.

Just as fascinating, the aforementioned main sponsor of the bill, Ellen Tauscher, is moving to the State Department, and among the candidates readying themselves to replace her is gay veteran Anthony Woods, who served two tours in Iraq as a platoon leader before coming out to his superiors and being discharged from the military. Woods would rather not be pigeonholed as the gay DADT candidate, and he has much more to offer than that. But clearly he becomes a powerful symbol in this debate, one that the President could end quickly with a little leadership.

Terrorizing The Rule Of Law

The GOP geniuses think they've found an issue they can run with. This has slowly built over the past several weeks, but now they've done a full rollout. It starts with the movie trailer, a preview of coming attractions.



Then they followed through with the main event, a bill literally called “The Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act,” which would prohibit the transfer of any "Terrorist" from Guantanamo Bay into a prison facility in the United States, without approval from the state's Governor and legislature, and some other legislative hoop-jumping.

Taken to its extreme, Republicans would call for the immediate closure of all prisons ("criminals... in your community!"), and the dispatching of all 2.3 million prisoners to some offsite floating barge, Australia, or that island of plastic in the Pacific. To suggest that a maximum-security prison could not possibly hold a Dangerous Terrorist is an insult to the men and woman of the federal corrections system, who already hold convicted terrorists in custody who received justice through a court of law, and basically acknowledges that those facilities are completely insecure, and should be feared by local residents. I'm sure the RNC and the Republican members of the House will pick up the costs of moving every single prisoner over to that plastic island. Because think of the children.

When pressed on the point that Americans held 425,000 German POWs at the height of WWII, bill sponsor Pete Hoekstra, who is crazy, incidentally, casually remarked that the threat of Al Qaeda surpasses the Nazis.



A substantial chunk of the Republican Party believes that people who live in caves represent a greater threat to the American way of life than the Third Reich. Just so you know.

However, I'm convinced that this is a bit of misdirection and Overton Window-lifting. Of course the idea that Scary Terrorists would endanger local communities while in prison is absurd and should be rejected. But that's not really the ultimate plan. John McCain and Lindsey Graham posted on the conservative blackboard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, with the more "sensible" view - that we must hold suspects indefinitely without trial for as long as we please, in violation of habeas corpus statutes, until they are tried in sham courts without Constitutional criminal justice protections.

• Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts. By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.

Our domestic criminal laws -- including their treatment of classified information -- are ill-suited for the complex national security issues inherent in the trial of enemy combatants. We have great faith in our military justice system -- appropriately modified for war crimes trials -- and we believe that military judges and lawyers render fair and impartial justice not only for our troops, but for enemy combatants as well.

• Third, preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror . Under the law of war, the idea that an enemy combatant has to be tried or released is a false choice. Rather, it is well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.

While there is little doubt that we initially cast the net too broadly in determining who merited enemy combatant status, the Department of Defense estimates nearly one in 10 detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield, including Said Ali al-Shihri (al Qaeda in Yemen's second-in-command), and Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, who reportedly now serves as the Taliban's operational commander in southern Afghanistan. We cannot let this continue.

A significant group of detainees still in custody at Guantanamo may be too dangerous to release, but they are not suitable for war crimes trials. In these cases, a system needs to be devised in which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

"Preventive detention" is a nice turn of phrase. "I think you may steal a candy bar later. Better put you in jail for a few months until everything blows over."

And unbelievably, this "fallback" position, which I always considered the reason to close Guantanamo in the first place, has gained traction inside the White House.

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system [...]

In a news conference this week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. emphasized that if the administration did use military commissions, the rules must give detainees “a maximum amount of due process.”

But, speaking of detainees whom American officials have accused of involvement in major terrorist plots, Mr. Holder added, “It may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.”

These military commissions represent a total obviation of the rule of law, an attempt to gather convictions they could not otherwise get. And what's left unsaid is the always shaky phraseology of the Obama plan, where some Gitmo detainees would be tried, some released, and this vague "third category," where the legal black hole of Guantanamo apparently remains.

It does no service, particularly in relating to our allies, to just insource Guantanamo with the same methods. People weren't angry about the site or the symbol, but the policies. But because the Republicans are being so transparently ridiculous with their "Eek! Prisoners going to prison, they'll kill us all!!!" pose, there may be a tendency to back up the White House's viewpoint. Not until they make perfectly clear that they intend to either try Gitmo prisoners in American courts, or release them. Any other options are unacceptable.

Crystal Pepsi

I won't identify the source, but I heard about a meeting between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a Democratic pol where he exclaimed that he figured out politics, and "it's all marketing." Looks like the rest of the GOP agrees with him.

Coming soon to a battleground state near you: a new effort to revive the image of the Republican Party and to counter President Obama's characterization of Republicans as "the party of 'no.'"

CNN has learned that the new initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will be announced Thursday.

It will involve an outreach by an interesting mix of GOP officials, ranging from 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and the younger brother of the man many Republicans blame for the party's battered brand: former President George W. Bush.

Now there's an idea! The failed Presidential candidate and the brother of the guy who destroyed the GOP brand teaming up to remake the party! Does someone want to tell Republicans that "remake" means something new?

But that's not all! They're also bringing on stage the people who have created the failed GOP brand this year.

In addition to Sen. McCain and Gov. Bush, GOP sources familiar with the plans tell CNN others involved in the new group's "National Panel Of Experts" will include:

*Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former national GOP chairman
*Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
*Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

It will report to GOP congressional leaders, and among those signing the announcement that will be made public Thursday are:

*House GOP Leader John Boehner
*House GOP Whip Eric Cantor
*House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence
*Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell
*The No. 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl
*And the Senate GOP Conference Chairman, Lamar Alexander

It's kind of amusing that Michael Steele, who's, ahem, the leader of the Republican National Committee, doesn't factor into this rebranding effort. Maybe because they've seen his Poochie the radical dog approach to attracting "the kids" to the party.

"You (Brzezinski) wear your hat one way you like to wear it, you know, kind of cocked to the left, you know, 'cause that's cool out West," Steele said. "In the Midwest, you guys (Scarborough) like to wear it a little bit to the right. In the South, you guys (Buchanan) wear the brim straight ahead. Now the Northeast, I wear my hat backwards, you know, 'cause that's how we roll in the Northeast."

I guess they tried to get Sarah Palin aboard as well, but couldn't reach her. When SARAH PALIN is reticent to join you, I mean...

I know that Republicans are never going to believe this, but maybe when they listen on the town hall meetings that will supposedly follow this effort, they can understand that nobody likes them anymore.

Republicans are widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy, according to internal polling presented to top GOP officials in Congress.

The same survey found President Barack Obama holds the support of a significant minority of self-described conservative, independent voters [...]

Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.

Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.

Republicans can keep claiming that they "strayed away from their core values" and need to go even more base-crazy in order to win, but the facts don't bear that out.

(Lindsey) Graham scoffed at the notion that the party was suffering because it was not conservative enough.

“Do you really believe that we lost 18-to-34-year-olds by 19 percent, or we lost Hispanic voters, because we are not conservative enough?” he said. “No. This is a ridiculous line of thought. The truth is we lost young people because our Republican brand is tainted.”

And what the party appears to be saying is, let's taint some more!

We Can't Have People With Personal Experience Giving Their Opinion!

From dumb as a stump and proud of it Brian Kilmeade on his radio show:

ANDREW NAPOLITANO (co-host): You may not know the name unless you live in California. Jay Bybee was a professional researcher for the Justice Department when he authored the principal of -- the main one -- of the torture memos.

President Bush awarded him by appointing him to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. That's the level of appellate court just below the Supreme Court. He was appointed to the 9th Circuit, which covers the western third of the United States.

There's a lot of pressure on Jay Bybee -- on Judge Bybee, now, because these memoranda, which obviously were not known about under -- during the time of his confirmation came -- came out.

Here's what John McCain had to say about it yesterday.

JOHN McCAIN [audio clip]: A resignation would be a decision he would have to make on his own, but he falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting fundamentally what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions.

Plus, under President Reagan, we signed a agreement against torture. We're in violation of that.

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Oh, come on. Number one, we all know John McCain is not a lawyer; this guy is. Number two, Judge, you knew at that time, this is --

NAPOLITANO: This is your guy, John McCain.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, now. Come on.

KILMEADE: No, he's not my guy. I like John McCain. I respect him. But there's a lot of issues I don't understand. Plus, he should not be allowed to talk on torture because he is clearly somebody who went through unspeakable pain and punishment --

NAPOLITANO: You mean, he shouldn't be allowed to talk -- he has an opinion like everybody else. He represents the state of Arizona.

KILMEADE: But he was tortured. He was tortured. And --

NAPOLITANO: Therefore, his views on torture are --

KILMEADE: -- are skewed.

NAPOLITANO: -- irrelevant because of what happened --

KILMEADE: -- are skewed.

NAPOLITANO: -- in 'nam? I think his views are particularly telling because he's been through this kind of thing.

KILMEADE: But what do you think he's going to be -- pro-torture --

NAPOLITANO: No.

KILMEADE: -- after he's been through it?

NAPOLITANO: Of course, he's not going to be pro-torture.

KILMEADE: And plus, I don't think this is torture. And they don't subscribe to the Geneva Conventions. We had this debate in 2002. You were on our set -- you were on constantly saying, "Look, they don't -- right -- the way the courts look at it right now, they do not fall under the Geneva Conventions." And that was what they were going under.

NAPOLITANO: I never said they didn't fall under the Geneva Conventions.

I should just submit this without comment, because it speaks for itself. But allow me a word on this. Kilmeade's belief that nobody should be allowed to have an opinion backed up with experience or knowledge tracks perfectly with the conservative movement, on a variety of subjects. We shouldn't listen to scientists on climate change, or health professionals on health care, or weapons inspectors on Iraq. The plural of data is not anecdote. Nobody with an informed opinion can possibly be dispassionate. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. This is simply a distilled form of that worldview.

The bigger problem lies in treating torture like it's a debate, complete with polls. The moment a debate over torture was engaged was the moment that America lost its moral authority. Obviously it's ridiculous to seriously state that anyone who has been tortured can't be part of a debate over torture. But it's just as ridiculous to have the debate at all, a debate over an issue that has been not only self-evident, but ingrained in the standard codes of law in civilized societies for centuries. We can open the subject again, but at that point we do lose the right to call ourselves civilized.

Another Round On Immigration

The temperature on the immigration debate has cooled somewhat since it became a Dobbsian nightmare a couple years back. I think the President has the strength to push something through at this time, but of course there's so much else to be done. No matter - he's apparently ready to tackle it again.

hile acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

One thing that argues in favor of addressing this is that immigration comes up as a familiar talking point on the right associated with any donestic policy. On health care, they talk about "free medical treatment for illegal immigrants." On education, "we're letting illegals into the schools." On infrastructure, "the only people who get those construction jobs are illegal immigrants." None of this is really all that true, but addressing the system and bringing people out of the shadows would defuse the talking point to an extent, though of course passing anything would be a major battle.

Ultimately, it's worth it, both to end the underground economy and to restore families. I wonder if the John McCains of the world, who in an earlier time had no problem backing some form of comprehensive immigration reform, would dare cross the lines of their increasingly nativist party. Demographically speaking, the Republican Party is dead unless they attract a bigger share of the Latino vote, and it always made sense to them to press for reform in this area. Just ask Karl Rove.

...Hopefully, Obama will seek advice from this Texas lawmaker and mandate changing Asian names to something “easier for Americans to deal with.” It's a melting pot!

Gates v. The Military Industrial Complex... or Just Building a New One?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a budget recommendation that is shocking in its sweeping change, extremely unusual for the Pentagon's go-along, get-along approach to military contracting over the past 50 years or so. Robert Farley summarizes.

1. No more F-22s.
2. Replacement Air Force bomber delayed indefinitely.
3. Ballistic missile defense funding leans toward the Navy.
4. Aircraft carrier acquisition slowed, with the fleet eventually dropping to 10 carriers.
5. Next generation cruiser (CGX) delayed indefinitely.
6. VH-71 Presidential helicopter dead.
7. No more than three DDG-1000, and maybe only one.
8. Future Combat Systems funding slashed.

Farley says "This is why Bob Gates is still secretary of defense; Obama didn't believe that such cuts would be possible under a Democratic secretary." Perhaps so. And I agree with a lot of it; the F-22 is obselete in the context of current wars, for example. Cold War-era weapons systems have no place in the modern military. These cuts aren't THAT deep - missile defense still gets about $1 billion, for example - but they are significant.

But let's consider these "cuts" fully - they would not represent an overall scaling down of the Pentagon budget, but a lateral move into a forward-looking belief that the wars of the future will be counter-insurgencies and not wars of territory. I agree with Noah Schachtman that this makes a certain amount of sense, as major weapons programs are useless in such combat missions, while warm bodies are at a premium. I see this as an effort to SAVE the military budget, not slash it. While it makes sense to focus on funding the services needed for the wars we actually fight, in the final analysis the total budget still swamps the rest of the world many times over, troops are still based in 130 countries, and the Pentagon still dwarfs the rest of the budget on discretionary spending. It seems to me like this is trading one set of contractors for another, in a fashion. That's why those who represent the counter-insurgency faction of the military are thrilled.

There may be savings in the acquisitions and the contracting process in this request - I certainly hope so. And Gates' comment that "this is a reform budget" gives cause for optimism. In addition, with lots of this budget devoted to health care and veteran's services, perhaps engaging in less wars will drop costs substantially, in ways that could not be done while building giant weapons systems. But I'm not seeing much of a challenge to the idea that military budget must be outsized relative to the overall budget forever. And a perusal of the Congressional reaction to this recommendation is pretty telling:

"Secretary Gates has set out major changes to the defense budget based on changed assumptions about the wars our military must be prepared to fight. This is a good faith effort, and I appreciate the hard work and thoughtful consideration Secretary Gates and his staff put into these proposals.

"However, the buck stops with Congress, which has the critical Constitutional responsibility to decide whether to support these proposals. In the weeks ahead, my colleagues and I will carefully consider these proposals and look forward to working with Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen as we prepare the Fiscal Year 2010 defense authorization act."

In other words, nice budget, now move over while I mark it up.

Significantly, John McCain seems to be on the side of reform. Jim Webb said this: "The secretary's announcement today is highly unorthodox ... Secretary Gates has proposed funding increases, reductions, deferrals, and cancellations in numerous defense programs. In the absence of a more detailed description of the strategic underpinnings justifying his funding priorities--including an assessment of the level of risk posed to U.S. national security interests--it is difficult to evaluate them in isolation."

The weapons contractor industry will be quick to strike against this budget as well, and almost for that reason alone, I see value in Gates' product. But it's hard to see this as much more than a juggling of numbers in what remains too high a budget for war.

...Predictable blather from James Inhofe:

"I cannot believe what I heard today," Inhofe said in a statement. "President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war."

Yes, "ravaged" them by eliminating weapons systems that aren't being used in this war. Sadly, such demagoguery is likely to work.

D-Trip "Targets" 8 House Seats - I'll Believe It When I See It

State Democrats are buzzing about this weekend's Carla Marinucci article entitled "California Dems target 8 GOP districts", which claims that Republican voter registration is dropping fast, providing a major opportunity to pick up Congressional seats in 2010.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted 35 districts across the country represented by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives - including eight in California - that were won by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, said Jennifer Crider, the committee spokeswoman.

The Democrats plan increased appeals to voters in those areas and will make aggressive efforts to recruit Democratic candidates to run against the Republican incumbents, she said [...]

The vulnerable California districts with Republican representatives that were won by Obama are those of Reps. Dan Lungren of Gold River (Sacramento County), Mary Bono-Mack of Palm Springs, David Dreier of San Dimas (Los Angeles County), Elton Gallegly of Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), Brian Bilbray of Solana Beach (San Diego County), John Campbell of Newport Beach (Orange County), Ken Calvert of Riverside and Howard "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County), the committee says.

It would be nice if I thought any of this would work. First of all, the registration changes didn't just spring up in December 2008. These trends have been occurring for some time, and were all present during the last election. Despite this, we had a candidate in CA-25 (McKeon) who spent less than $10,000 or her entire campaign. The candidate in CA-24 (Gallegly) won her primary because of her ballot designation and without spending any significant money. In the races where we managed to compete, our candidates significantly underperformed the top of the ticket, and in most cases underperformed Barbara Boxer's performance in 2004, when a less dominant John Kerry was at the top of the ticket.

I don't think there are that many other people who have followed California congressional races closer than I have, and I have to say that we simply suck at elections in these kinds of races out here in California. The state party is dysfunctional at best and downright criminal at worst. Put it this way: we had the same chance to win all these seats in 2008. Nate Silver, making a separate point, provides a list of the 30 districts where Obama won between 50 and 52 percent of the vote. As you'll see, we did extremely well in those seats, except for in California.

Barack Obama won 51 percent of the vote in NY-20 on November 4th. How did congressional candidates perform in other districts where he received between, say, 50 and 52 percent of the vote? Again, we see essentially an even split; Republicans won 16 of 30 such districts and Democrats won 14:

Won by Republicans (16): CA-24, CA-25, CA-26, CA-44, CA-45, CA-50, FL-10, FL-18, MI-4, MN-3, NE-2, NJ-7, NY-23, VA-4, WI-1, WI-6

Won by Democrats (14): FL-22, KS-3, MI-1, MI-7, MN-1, NC-2, NJ-3, NY-1, NY-19, NY-20*, NY-24, TX-23, VA-2, WA-3

Winning percentage in these seats in states other than CA: 58.3%
Winning percentage in CA: 0.0%

By the way, the other two districts not mentioned above that are now being "targeted"? CA-03 (Lungren) was 49-49 Obama, and CA-48 (Campbell) was also 49-49 Obama. Heck, even CA-46 was only 50-48 McCain. Obama got 46% in CA-19 (Radanovich), where there was no Democratic candidate, and 47% in CA-40 (Royce).

Some would argue that, properly resourced, these seats would suddenly become very winnable. I give you CA-50, where Nick Leibham consistently beat Brian Bilbray in fundraising and maxed out at the 45% ceiling on Democrats in that district.

CA-44 is somewhat winnable because Bill Hedrick came close in '08 and is running again. We lost our best candidate in CA-03, Bill Durston, and everywhere else, I'm just extremely dubious, because the state party has systematically psyched itself out of winning these seats (thanks to the Faustian bargain of incumbency-protected gerrymandering designed by... imminent state party chair John Burton), and the commitment at the national level has been known to wane. We've left dozens of winnable elections on the table the past two cycles, dramatically underperforming the nation. A little DCCC money won't change that.