Month: August 2009

The Future

Noted on the passing of Edward M. Kennedy: who can possibly eulogize this man? After all, he gave what may well be the finest eulogy possible for his brother Bobby. Any good eulogy should, to my mind, capture something essential or instructive about the person being eulogized, impart the sense of loss at a new and painful vacancy in the lives of those left behind, and then impel these same folks to, as Joe Biden might put it: get up. Get back up. Keep going.

And so we have the text; EMK notes some of RFK’s own words on his father, and their relationship, their family dynamic in general, and then continues:

That is what Robert Kennedy was given. What he leaves to us is what he said, what he did, and what he stood for.

and then goes on to quote extensively from a fine speech that Bobby had made in 1966:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

It’s stunning how the essential vocabulary of RFK echoes so strongly in the usage and rhythms that Obama uses in his best efforts. At any rate, EMK closes his eulogy of his brother with these lines that I can never quite believe he actually got through with a clear and reasonably even voice:

That is the way he lived. That is what he leaves us.

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

“Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.”

Just an unbelievable piece of oratory in the worst possible moment of his life. If we have people in public, political life writing and delivering speeches like this today, I’m not sure who they are (barring one particularly prominent individual, that is). I don’t think you can possibly underestimate the advantage Obama’s oratorical skills bring to the table. And one hopes he’s about to start raining thunderstrokes down like Zeus from Olympus; he’d better be, if he wants anything approaching a substantive healthcare reform to move in the current environment.

Because, far from seeing Kennedy’s passing as a moment for reflection and renewed spirit of legislative compromise, the GOP sees and will use this event as a powerful lever to block legislation (Kennedy would have never -or- This bill is certainly not up to the standards of our departed friend, Ted Kennedy, and etc…) and/or try to ram a shoddy piece of work through in the later stages by affixing his name to it and hoping the Democrats can’t stand to vote “No.” Mark my words, they’ll do all this and worse, all the while decrying the Democratic party as waving the bloody shirt over Kennedy at any and all possible opportunities.

Not actually spoken during RFK’s eulogy (but apparently included in the prepared remarks) is this apt paragraph that, I think, rings as true today as it likely did 40 years ago, when these men were facing down a different, but seemingly insoluble, societal rift:

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

Most of It Bad (but keep walking!)

Lord Cheney of Darkside (Fourthbranch! to his friends) begins our story with this pronouncement on FOXnews (no, I’m not linking to them; trust me or find it your-own-self):

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Ah, yes. The old “totally secret documents that will never, ever come out absolutely absolve me of authorizing, née positively cheerleading in favor of torture, whether it works or not. I mean, if torturing people also happens to generate some useful, actionable intelligence, it’s a win/win. But if it doesn’t, well, we’ll still torture ‘em. Right? I mean, who in the room can’t enjoy, er, I mean ’approve with my heart full of sadness’ some of that there torture stuff?”

And, hey, what do you know? The government actually went ahead and released said documents. A bit on the [redacted] side, but the essence seems to be there. For instance, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka KSM) was waterboarded over 180 times within the span of a month. What did we get out of that:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda’s] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda’s] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

Of course, it seems he gave that stuff up pretty easily. Somewhere into the torture phase he, surprise surprise, just started making shit up to get the torture to stop:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

Unsurprisingly, the documents make the case that good-old, traditional “policework” style investigations gave us the most voluminous and best information:

For example, lists of names found on the computer [REDACTED] — a key [al-Qaeda] financial operative and facilitator for the 11 September attacks — seized in March 2003 represented [al-Qaeda] members who were to receive funds. Debriefers questioned detainees extensively on the names to determine who they were and how important they were to the organization. The information [REDACTED] helped us to better understand al-Qa’ida’s hierarchy, revenues, and expenditures, [REDACTED] as well as funds that were available to families.

What an astonishing outcome! Patrick Appel says it quite well:

“The documents are heavily redacted, but nothing we can read refers to torture techniques providing solid information…. It’s worth repeating that no one denies torture produces information. It produces loads of information, most of it bad. The same or better information can be collected through other techniques and, again, nothing in these documents compares and contrasts these methods.”

Tie all of this in with the GOP’s steadfast resistance to any investigation of said torture policies. Why, here’s favored mouthpiece Joe Lieberman doing the dirty-work of laying out the “we were only following orders!” fig-leaf:

These public servants must of course live within the law but they must also be free to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for [their] behavior

My stars, what sort of country would it be if our public servants had to come to work each and every day with the nuisance of THE LAW hanging over their heads. We can’t have some sort of empirical reality getting in the way of whatever policy decisions we might need people to carry out. Next thing you know, they might start wanting to hold the President to the various laws of the land. Then just think of the mess we’d be in. It’s a slippery slope, I tells ya.

As Peggy Noonan so sagely advised us, re: G.W. Bush administration policy, enforcement of the law, and investigations of law-breaking activities:

“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”

Profiles in Courage

Joe Lieberman on health care reform:

Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that’s where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy is out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now.

Well, Joe, if you’d bother to read the bills in question, you’d see that the programs phase in over time (currently ranging from three to five years so far as I know; so far as Lieberman’s concerned the figure is five years, the number that the Baucus Plan puts on it).

I challenge Joe to find me an economist, any economist, that says we’ll be in as bad or worse shape in five years’ time. Furthermore, I challenge Joe to explain why it is that Congress should only be considering policy based on the conditions of the previous six months and not those spanning (and constituting) the next decade?

Harry Reid should immediately cut back Lieberman’s responsibilities in the Demomcratic Caucus such that he has more time to read extant pending legislation and also plan long-term.

El Dorado

As the Obama administration merrily dispatches with that part of healthcare that the public broadly (and, the WH would add: inexplicably) favors, the Public Option, they still stand pat on the part that will really get the folks screaming: the individual mandate. Marc Ambinder chanels the latest (and inevetiably a self-loathing Clinton administration alum) “anonymous source” from inside the Obama administration who chooses to leak this sort of self-damning pablum:

The president continues to operate under the belief that liberals will warm to the bill when presented with a goodybag that includes includes an individual mandate, community rating, guaranteed issue, and a minimum required package. There’s no chance, really, that a bill WON’T feature these reforms. Quietly, to secure and keep Democrats on board, the White House is going to bargain, providing inducements, like more money for favored projects, etc., in order to secure individual votes.

Let’s get Rahm in order on something right now: Without a robust public option there can be no individual mandate. Without strict cost controls and the much-longed-after downward bend to the cost curve, all you’re left with is today’s overpriced, low-choice coverage which, under new laws anybody can get…and they’d have to. That’s sort of why the insurance lobbies favor a plan with no public option and/but an individual mandate; especially if their buddy Max Baucus manages to use the legislation to increase their profit margins to 35%. Oh, and we’d be ditching the employer mandate as well. So there’d be impetus for employers to ditch the matching coverage schemes of today to cut their costs in favor of kicking you out on your own…where you’d be required by law to pay ever more since you’d have no access to the sort of pooled coverage groups and bargaining power that might actually, you know, contain costs. This is really sounding like a wonderful plan they’ve got going.

You can ditch the public option, but with it has, HAS to go: the individual mandate. You then rely on slow growth of acceptance (the campaigning Obama said as much: people will buy healthcare if they can afford it. They want to buy in, but often can’t in the current setup that’s too heavily weighted towards certain “good” jobs with plans attached or the occasional large coverage pools.) It would be a bad outcome, and would extend the period of suffering for all of us; but it’s not nearly as bad as losing the public option and the employer mandate and yet inexplicably keeping the individual mandate along with none of the potential consumer choice and provider competition-oriented benefits. Now you’re forced to buy insurance that too few folks can afford anyway.

Instead, we’re being told to quit being smelly hippies and get on board with the wonderful program of force-fed shit sandwiches, and could we please all agree it’s the best of all possible worlds? Uh, no. We can’t. Lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way.

Short Attention Span Theater

John Boehner is really, really pushing the lack of ‘Mericans to store and recall any fucking fact, no matter how recently the were exposed to said fact:

“It’s a shame that the White House and their liberal allies are now trying re-write history. From the beginning of this debate, Republicans have tried to work with the President and Democrats on real health care reform that reduces cost and expands access for the American people. Instead, Democrats played the old Washington game, bribing and log-rolling special interests to produce a plan that will cost at least a trillion dollars and just won’t work.”

I see. So this is some other group than that GOP whose second-in-command in the Senate had said that “almost all Republicans” were likely to oppose reform, no matter how bipartisan its sourcing, up to and including a bill that the Republican members of the committee might (theoretically) have written themselves. Indeed this is entirely the fault of the Democrat. And that’s certainly good news for Republicans.

The Grassley’s Always Greener

Emphasis added to these collected statements:

[John Kyl], the Senate Republican whip, speaking to reporters on a conference call from his home state of Arizona, said that even if the Democrats do away with a government-run insurance option, the GOP most likely won’t support the bill that’s being written in the Senate.

“I think it’s safe to say that there are a huge number of big issues that people have,” Kyl said, referring to Republican senators. “There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.”

Asked if he’d support a bill if it were deficit neutral, Kyl said Dems may find a way to pass reform without adding to the debt, “but that doesn’t mean the Republicans will support it.” Asked if he could tolerate a nonprofit insurance cooperative instead of a public option, Kyl added that a co-op is “a step towards government-run health care in this country.” The Senate Minority Whip added that “almost all Republicans” are likely to oppose reform, even if it’s the result of a bipartisan compromise.

So, let’s summarize: the GOP will not support a bill if it adds to the deficit or is deficit neutral. They will not support a bill that includes public options, co-ops, or anything like them. Kyl calls all of that a “Trojan Horse.” They furthermore will not support a bill that is the product of any bipartisan compromise. John Kyl is specifically saying that the GOP will not support a bill that they themselves create through the ongoing Baucus committee process with the Democrats.

Really, the only question left on the table is: would the GOP support a bill they themselves write? I think we all know the answer to that one. The party has repeatedly shown zero interest in governing. Even when they’re in charge of the government. So why should we expect anything to change now?

Way Down in the Hole

Chuck Grassley, when directly offered the hypothetical “Chuck, go write whatever you want into the bill” counter-factual responded thusly:

Chuck Todd asked Grassley whether he’d vote for the bill if it was a good piece of policy that he’d crafted but that couldn’t attract more than a handful of Republican votes. “Certainly not,” replied Grassley.

[…]

“I am negotiating for Republicans,” he said. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good negotiator.”

Implicit in this statement are two facts: a) Republicans are not going (and never planned ) to vote for health care reform, even if they write the bill, and b) Republicans are negotiating in bad faith because of (a), this meaning either they hope to kill the bill by negotiating it to death, or they just like talking to salesmen.

And yet, which party keeps on coming back up to the table, hoping this time they’ll manage to “negotiate” a bipartisan solution? Each time offering up a few more sacrificial lambs in the hope that, this time, the GOP will finally love them and offer true forgiveness? Exactly when does the GOP give up something? Exactly when do the Democrats stop giving in? (Answers visible only in the Teacher’s Edition: Never and Never.)

“Bipartisan” in the current situation means: that to which the Blue Dogs will acquiesce. Full Stop. You get those votes, you have achieved a bipartisan outcome. Period, the end. There is no bill sufficiently milquetoast to achieve a 75-80 vote margin that Grassley seems to implicitly claim is what’s required to “earn” his precious vote. To assume any health-care bill is going to achieve that kind of margin is utter lunacy. But this is the baseline at which “negotiations” are happening. Tells you a lot about the current fecklessness of the Democratic Party in the Senate.

True progress will only come when Harry Reid (and, for that matter, Rahm Emaneul) realizes this and begins to enforce fealty at cloture votes accordingly. You vote out of line on the cloture issue of a key policy initiative like this one, you lose all seniority, all committee assignments, and suddenly find yourself out working the boats with McNulty. You also find that you’re facing a well-funded primary challenge in the next round. Simple as that.

The Next Generation

Obama gets close to something in this closing paragraph he used recently:

Nearly fifty years ago, in the midst of the noisy early battles to create what would become Medicare, President Kennedy said, “I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country, and all of us, shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our time.” Now it falls to us to meet the challenges of our time. And if we can come together, and listen to one another; I believe, as I always have, that we will rise to this moment, we will build something better for our children, and we will secure America’s future in this new century.

You take that, and combine the sense of it with this:

Think about this. You do the responsible thing. You pay your premiums each month so that you are covered in case of a crisis. And then that crisis comes. You have a heart attack. Or your husband finds out he has cancer. Or your son or daughter is rushed to the hospital. And at your most vulnerable – at your most frightened – you get a phone call from your insurance company. Your coverage is revoked. It turns out, once you got sick, they scoured your records looking for a reason to cancel your policy, and they found a minor mistake on an insurance form you submitted years ago.

The final product begins with paragraphs like those and ends up more like this:

I refuse to see us crush what will be the accomplishments of the next generation, to hang a stone around the necks of our own children, through the intransigence and short-sightedness of a small group vigorously defending the discredited ideas and failed programs of the last generation. We won’t saddle our children, my children, with the crushing debt and continual uncertainty of the current mishmash of a tangled, outmoded, and all-too-frequently unresponsive insurance system that was underpowered to address even the simpler medical system of yesteryear. Those days are over. We’re better than that. The time to fight for our future is now. The time to fight for our children’s future is now.

All Hands On the Bad One

And so we hear that the so-called Public Option is probably heavily weighted towards “option” and rather more lightly so toward “public.” We’ll end up with the Co-Ops, a watered down version of the already rather watery Public Option of so much debate. It’s too bad that thousands of grannies have already gone to their deaths at the behest of the various death panels that had yet to hear of these operative changes.

But I think Yglesias has it right:

Given that adding a robust public option into the mix would reduce costs, if you set up a system without a public option wouldn’t you be able to add the public option in later years as an uncontroversial application of the reconciliation process? It seems to me that doing so would count as a 100 percent legitimate deficit reduction play. The public option concept also polls substantially better than does health reform as a whole. Under the circumstances, the odds for securing 50 senate votes for adding one strike me as pretty good.

Yep. Follow the MA model more or less exactly. Get most of everyone insured, giving up cost-controls to the GOP as you go. Then you find: hey, without those cost controls, costs aren’t, uh, controlled. And you revisit cost controls because, what do you know, the program itself is damned popular. Even assuming the 60-vote majority has by then evaporated or diminished, you can ram it through on a Reconciliation basis because it’s absolutely 100% budget related and finally brings the costs under control.