Category: Uncategorized

To put it bluntly, the idea that Lieberman now finds the very same proposal a grave threat to the public good is simply not credible. And while I understand the rules of strategic gamesmanship, somebody who took health care reform seriously–somebody who genuinely cared about ending the misfortune that visits people without affordable medical care–simply would not have made such a strong stand, over such a tiny issue, at such a pivotal time.

The proof, I think, is in the actions of Lieberman’s adversaries. Sherrod Brown supports the public option just as passionately as Lieberman opposes it. The same goes for Jay Rockefeller. But Brown and Rockefeller have already made a series of huge concessions, because those concessions were necessary to move a bill through Congress. Last night, both men signaled they were prepared to make one last concession–to give up on the idea of a public plan altogether–because that’s what it will take to pass the law.

Brown and Rockefeller, in other words, acted to promote the greater good. I can believe some of their adversaries are doing the same. I find it hard to believe Lieberman is among them.

Jonathan Cohn, writing in TNR and pretty much summing up the Lieberman Affair. Doesn’t Joementum look so very tired?

Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it’s the beginning of a road to single-payer,“ Mr. Lieberman said. "Jacob Hacker, who’s a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, ‘This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.’

Joe Lieberman on why he flip-flopped on the Medicare buy-in.
And you thought I was joking. El Dorado, here we come.

Shit sandwich

Some on the Hill remain worried that Lieberman will discover new points of contention in the coming days, as they believe he had signaled that he wouldn’t filibuster the Medicare buy-in. They worry whether his word is good.

No reason to worry, Ezra. It is not good and never has been. The goalposts will move again. This time, my guess is “We’re moving too fast. The vote must wait until after Christmas.” Which would effectively kill the bill, so far as I can tell. So that’s what comes next from Joementum. Deep down I always knew I could count on Joe to submarine both the health insurance options of ~40 million people and the presidency of his least preferred option because he faced and lost a primary challenge. What a true patriot. Truly a model for us all.

Digby sums it up rather succinctly:

I think we have a way to go before this bill is bad enough for [Lieberman] and his cronies to allow the Democrats to commit political suicide with it.

Indeed we do. And indeed they are committing suicide. The only saving grace for 2010 is that the “you are now required to buy crummy insurance you cannot afford act of 2009” goes into effect after the 2010s, and but just in time to destroy Obama’s reelection bid. President Palin, here we come. (Naturally, she’ll abruptly quit after 90 days leaving us with President Beck. You heard it here first.)

I was very focused on a group that’s post-50, or maybe post-55,” Lieberman explained to the Connecticut Post. “People who have retired early, or unfortunately, been laid off early, who lose their health insurance or are too young to qualify for Medicare. And what I was proposing is that they have an option to buy into Medicare on the premise that that would be less expensive.

Joe Lieberman, three months ago

Let it Snowe

I tend to agree with Josh Marshall here:

the key issue senate Democrats now have in dealing with Joe Lieberman isn’t his position on the the Medicare Buy-In [it’s that Lieberman] isn’t negotiating in good faith. […] it’s as clear to [Republicans] as it is to anyone else that he’s now basically mocking his Democratic colleagues by moving the goal posts every time a new agreement is struck.

[…]

it’s definitely time for the Democratic caucus to strip Lieberman of all the benefits he receives as a member of the Democratic caucus. But that doesn’t accomplish anything at the moment. The only path I can see for the Dems is that they need to try to put 60 votes together with Sen. Snowe.

Two birds, one stone: give Snowe the chairmanship of Homeland Security (and whatever the hell else she wants) in exchange for her cloture vote. She can do whatever she wants to on final passage. She keeps the chair so long as she votes for cloture. Every time, every issue. Period. Irregular as hell? Sure. But it would drive home the point that playtime is over. If you value your committee appointments and/or office accommodations and caucus with Democrats then YOU WILL VOTE FOR CLOTURE. Or you will find yourself in the Senatorial equivalent of Siberia. Likewise, if you’re a Republican willing to deal on the issues of the day: we’ll make your life much more comfortable in exchange for some painless votes on ending debate.

Either way, Lieberman should find himself so far down the power ladder that he has a hard time buying bean salad at the Senate cafeteria. Only then will this idiocy even begin to stop.

And, by the by, if you believe for one second this isn’t entirely about tweaking the smelly hippies that caused Joe all his problems: you are without a clue. That’s all it’s about. Joementum could care less about policy or what’s best for the most people. He’s got some petty axes to grind and the issue to do it on today happens to be insurance reform. Tomorrow: cap and trade. The Senate is, was, and will be 59-41. Plan accordingly. Find the trapping that Lieberman most prizes and strip it away. You might get it back when… It’s childish, but also the only way to proceed when dealing with a child.

AmericaLand in bad decline

Re: this and this prior post, Fake Steve Jobs reports on the chat he had with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. Here’s some highlights:

Now, the thing about [“Meet the Beatles”] was, on the day [the album] hit the U.S. the whole world changed. Like, before that day, the world was one way, music was one way, culture was one way — and then after that day the world was never the same ever again, and as soon as you heard that album you knew that, and even if you were only nine years old, which I was, you just knew. You knew. Sales were crazy.

[…] there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted.

Absolutely goddamned right. AT&T’s metaphorical Meet the Beatles response to the iPhone data-deluge seems to be:

“we need to figure out a way to keep people out of record stores. Prevent them from entering, dissuade them from buying the records if they’re already in there. That is the winning formula.”

Which is precisely the reaction that puts AT&T out of business. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon (and for a long time). Back to (fake) Steve:

Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a blessing. It’s an indication that people love what we’re doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you. You’re in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you’re right in the sweet spot.

Indeed they are. Reaction? Let’s piss it away for some modest, short-term gains. The model, you’ll recall, is to sell crippled phones that, since people can’t actually use, don’t tax our network at all. AT&T simply doesn’t understand that the world has turned and left them there, in the past, with a shitty flip phones business while everyone else is up here, in the “future,” waiting on good pipes. Praying someone will take their money for those (still mythical) good pipes. That AT&T doesn’t see it that way is mostly because of the sentence to which I added emphasis: AT&T doesn’t want to believe that they are only selling pipe. They think they are selling something else entirely. I’m quite sure they can’t vocalize exactly what that thing is, but they inevitably deny the notion that they are, in fact, already a dumb-pipes company, though a very bad one. And this is why they fail. They think their subscribers care who is providing them with the dumb pipes instead of how well the dumb pipes work. And it is on this point that (fake) Steve really, really gets going:

Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would  mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

[…] everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out […and…] it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

Empahsis added to point out (fake) Steve likely recapitulating the secret mission statement of AT&T. They sell pipes, for chrissakes. And yet they think it is in their interest to restrict and deny people access to those pipes, which said people feel they have contracted for access to and have every right to access. Worse, AT&T seems to feel this is a winning strategy. And maybe it is. For 2009, and even some of 2010. But 2011? Not so much. I guess Randall and his lot will have vested and retired to Nantucket by then.

That this sort of shit seems to be the organizing concept of American industry for the past half-century or so is, uh, totally unrelated and nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Fake Steve sums it up:

I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

Nate Silver on the Public Option

squashed notes “They’re good thoughts” in reference to this article. I’d call them indispensible. Particularly this:

1) The energy by progressive activists on behalf of the public option has done more good than harm, and by a wide margin.

2a) Nevertheless, the public option is/was a relatively minor part of the health care bill, at least once it became clear that it (i) wouldn’t be pegged to Medicare rates, and (ii) would only be available to a small fraction of the population.

2b) To claim that a health care bill without a public option is anything other than a huge achievement for progressives is, frankly, bullshit.

Absolutely right. It hurts to hear it, I know, but this is 100% the case. Sorry.

I think he’s both right and wrong on this, though:

Liberals have tended to underestimate what a significant political achievement it would be for Democrats to pass such a major bill that has become rather unpopular with the public.

Agreed on underestimation. What he leaves aside, though, is that Democrats in Congress don’t seem to appreciate that they are going to own this legislation. They’d better make it to their liking and damned effective too…because they are going to be the only ones defending it on the hustings in 2010 and 2012. That said, improvement over the current mire shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. The problem is, you need a group of policy-minded individuals who are genuinely looking to improve the situation rather than scratch the back of their favorite interest groups. So we’re in trouble.

Nate Silver on the Public Option

The Mortal Majority

jimray:

“…although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy [Republicans] espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind. And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles.”

— Tom Schaller over at FiveThirtyEight on the Republican party’s identity crisis.

All I have to say to this is: absolutely goddamned right. And, worst of all, they seem to think this is a winning strategy going forward. And it may just appear to be so (briefly) come 2010. Bad bad bad for the country all the way around. Policy matters not, it’s simply a movement based on pure fear, uncertainty, and doubt. An economic rebound will help, but only somewhat. Until we’re largely through this demographic shift, I suspect the country will only become more and more ungovernable. Something has got to give.