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I'll refer to Digby for more on this one. I heard Jessica Yellin call anyone who doesn't like Dick Cheney a "hater" and couldn't believe my ears, but Digby summed up the entire segment much better than I could ever hope to so I'll let her take it from here...Moonbeams And Starshine.
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I want to propose a new amendment be added during the conference committee when the House and Senate get together to merge the health-care reform bills. I know the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will love it, since they are officially members of Congress now. Here it is.
All pro-life male members of Congress who ejaculate without the express intent of making a baby will be considered to have had an abortion. (This will include airport-bathroom encounters.) Under this new rule, the male pro-life members then must fall in line with the same restrictions to health care as women will have to under the Stupak Amendment. Then starting in 2013, all pro-life men in America will be covered under this provision as well.
Out of the 56 women in the Democratic caucus, only two voted for Stupak. All 17 Republican women voted for it.
What this adds up to is that 97% of the Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment were male. 90% of the Republicans were male.
I would have to guess that if more than 17% of the congress were women, there would be a little bit less likelihood that women's rights would be so often used as a handy tool to placate neanderthals.
If men want to lead this country in the debate about abortion, then they should show real leadership and take responsibility for their behavior. Are you with me, Bishops? A woman can't just stand around and get pregnant. She needs our seed to be planted in her garden, so why should a woman be held to a higher standard than a man? Is that the democracy and freedom our troops are fighting for?
I'm sure the USCCB will gladly jump on board with this because they are in the sex business and are considered the world's No. 1 experts in that field. They understand better than any living person how a baby is made -- after all, they are Bishops. Imagination is a wonderful thing and can inform and educate people who have never experienced sex. Wow, who knew?
By releasing a transparently hyperbolic and self-serving study on the effects of health reform, the insurance industry appears to have blundered in a big way. They discredited themselves in the eyes of the media elite, alienated potentially sympathetic members of Congress, and rallied Democrats around a common foe.
So what are they doing now? They seem to be trying the same stunt again, with a brand new study. It's not as deceptive as the last one. But it's not going to win any points for intellectual honesty, either.
This time the study's sponsor is the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), rather than America's Health Insurance Programs. The hired gun accounting firm is Oliver Wyman, instead of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But the message is the same as before: Pass reform, as currently envisioned, and insurance premiums will go way up...read on
Cohn thinks this report is slightly better than the last one, but they both end the same. If we implement health care reform they promise to raise your rates. Why isn't the media reporting this? They are threatening American lives and families and this should not be tolerated.
Can someone please explain to me why this isn't a blatant threat? Nice little health care system you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
In a normal country, this kind of corporate threat, in which they openly say that unless they get their way, they will raise premiums sky high and make everyone suffer, would be considered criminal. After all, premium pricing is entirely in their hands --- and that's why we are in the terrible situation we are in today.
This is f*&king criminal. I'm sitting here and having a nice dream. I see Harry Reid acting like a real majority leader telling Congress that this is unacceptable. And then he fades to black and I'm transported to the House of Representatives. They are spending the day rebuking these reports for the phonies that they are and they pass legislation that makes it a criminal offense with a maximum of up to three years in jail for any lobby-bastards who put out bogus reports that are circulated to intimidate Americans. Now this is a fantasy I know, but they do spend hours of time making dedications of parks to the rich and famous people and in my fantasy they spend a couple of hours and threaten all groups that actively work to undermine legislation with lies.
And Alan Grayson leads the charge.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the authors of AHIP's report, put out a statement last night that basically said, "Hey, we weren't paid to evaluate the effects of the entire bill, but rather a small slice of it." The statement only seems to reinforce critics' view that the report is skewed precisely because it doesn't take into account the totality of reform. PwC's report estimates that insurance premiums will rise faster under the proposed reforms than under the current system.
The last, and key, line from the statement: "If other provisions in health care reform are successful in lowering costs over the long term, those improvements would offset some of the impacts we have estimated.”
In other words, PwC is saying if reform's cost containment measures work, their estimate could be wrong.
The Villagers always love to attack us liberal bloggers and leave conservative bloggers alone. I know in their hearts they can't stand the dirty hippies that we are, but then I read this post by my pal John Cole and I realized something:
The moment I heard Snowe was going to vote for the bill, I began furiously refreshing Red State for the reaction. Finally, they deliver:
---
That is right, folks. To show unhappy they are, they are going to ask you to buy rock salt through their amazon store and mail it to Olympia Snowe. They don’t call them the Red State Strike Farce for nothing.
Seriously, how do I make a joke about this?
(You have to check out the screen grab Cole has. It is "the joke," Mr. Cole.)
They are too stupid to be taken seriously even by the John Harwoods of the pundit class so I know why they do it. Because we do have political influence and it bothers the Beltway media elites profoundly. I'd say we're doing our job. Now pack up your rock salt and get to UPS.
TPMMuckraker: It's starting to look more and more like Texas governor Rick Perry orchestrated an effort to thwart a state probe into an arson investigation that may have led to the execution of an innocent man.
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Rachel Maddow highlighted our Blue America ad which calls out Blanche Lincoln over her stance on the public option.
A Bad Day to Oppose Health Reform
Rachel Maddow: And of course there has been a barrage of ads taken out by progressive groups targeting conservative and potentially vulnerable Democrats like Senator Blanche Lincoln and Congressman Mike Ross both of Arkansas both of who have said they oppose a public health insurance option. A brand new ad produced by the political action committee Blue America just started running last night.
...Ad: We can barely pay our bills and Blanche Lincoln is worried about the insurance companies?...
Maddow: This is what a full court press for health reform looks like. And the terrible, no good, very bad day for the anti-health reform forces today is what it looks when a full court press is working.
There is a full-court press going on and I want to thank the blogosphere for not sitting back and letting Conservadems dictate the terms of the debate.
We don't know what Lincoln's going to do. She, along with Conrad and Baucus, are the only Democrats to vote against all forms of the PO in the Finance Committee. It's hard to imagine that she's going to vote for a plan that contains one on the floor. But there is no reason that she shouldn't allow her party to have an up or down vote even if she votes no in the end. It's all about cloture at this point and we need to keep the pressure on.
Arkansas' Blanche Lambert Lincoln trails all four of her leading Republican challengers in the first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 survey in the state.
Lincoln fails to get 50% of the vote in any of the match-ups, and any incumbent who falls short of that level is considered vulnerable.
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(h/t Heather)
Richard Wolffe returned to Countdown this week, absent from MSNBC airwaves for only a month after Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his full time employer was no longer Newsweek, but a lobbying firm:
Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows. What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.
This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure: who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States. Then again, Wolffe himself -- when it was previously revealed that he was exploiting his position as a Newsweek reporter covering the Obama campaign to leverage access to Obama in order to write a glowing book about him -- said this:
And [Wolffe] suggested he’s not that different from other reporters in an era in which the business and the profession of journalism have gotten closer and closer.
"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers.
"You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.
And yet, he's back...with nary a word about his absence, still as an MSNBC political analyst.
Don't get me wrong, I like Richard Wolffe in general, and appreciated his appearances on Countdown in the past, but to name him as a "Senior Strategist at Public Strategies" is truly the sparest way to describe him as a lobbyist and really blurs the lines between journalism and promotion/propaganda beyond what should be acceptable. How can we ever know if Wolffe's analysis is truly what he believes or if it's what he's been paid to promote by a client?
And frankly, I'm tired of the insular nature of these broadcasts, when the same predictable people show up day after day after day. To be fair to Keith, Olbermann is not the only news anchor with a retinue of guests they stick with over and over. They all do it. Even Rachel Maddow brings on "Uncle Pat" Buchanan, whose views are generally factually wrong or so far outside the mainstream, you can't but wonder why he's still on television. Wolffe isn't like that. But as I've documented before on media balance and biases, so much critical information is withheld from we viewers already that we generally don't get a fair view of the issues of the day, I really do have to ask if there are no other voices that Olbermann can turn to that he has to bring back a DC lobbyist?
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I went to see a preview of Michael Moore's new film: Capitalism, A Love Story at the Bruin Theater in Westwood last week with Howie and Digby and it was a very fun night.
Moore has an incredible sense of humor and it always translates well into his movies and Capitalism is no different. He makes you laugh throughout his new project with images of the Roman Empire to satirical caricatures of Bush and AIG, but then he can also make you cry a second later, which makes his movies all the more powerful. When you see people holding camcorders while the eviction police are breaking down their doors to remove them your heart cries out.
We know that Wall Street and the mortgage industry pulled a monster con game on Americans and the result was that hard-working families lost their most prized position and that is the message at the heart of his movie. What good is "Capitalism" if it can't fill the basic needs of our people? How has it served America? Not how has it served the top 1% wealthy population, but the remaining 99% of the country that is driven by the messaging that you too can become rich and famous if you just work hard enough.
Ahhh, The American Dream.
What Moore believes is that capitalism is an absolute failure and is actually evil because at its heart, it's missing a moral core. The core comes back to the American worker. Does capitalism translate into the kind of America his father was part of while he grew up in Michigan? A place where a person could work hard, earn enough to raise the family and then retire with a pension? To Moore, the answer proves it has been a failure. He doesn't say he wants socialism to take hold, but I thought he was arguing for a sort of Constitutional Capitalism since he liked Capitalism back in the days when he father was able to prosper working at one company his entire life. Corporations should have to take care of their employees just like they do their profits. An equal partnership, so to speak. Is it possible? Moore thinks the system has become too corrupted, too evil to succeed in delivering the promise of a good life for the vast majority of the country.
Corporations are beholden to their stock holders and must maximize profits at all costs, regardless of how that affects their workers. So, even if GM records a huge profit for a particular year, they could then cut thousands of workers from the company the following year just to increase profits. Destroying cities and people's lives in the process don't factor in even when there has been no financial shortfall for them. To Moore that is the real evil and the way he sees it, it may be too late to fix.
He attacks Wall Street and Congress and all the players you think he would over the bailouts and then he asks the viewer to come up with a solution to the problem as he sees it.
Can America survive without Capitalism? Where do we go from here? There is much to see in this new flick and much to like. The one thing that he does is also give his audience plenty to think about.
"I believe the private system is important because it brings innovation, it brings energy, it brings change, it brings ideas that are often used in the public sector system as well," said Richard Collins, senior vice president for underwriting, pricing and health care economics at UnitedHealthcare. "I think we can have both a public and private system."
Predictably, progressive bloggers want to use this to sell the public option. Fair enough.
But why aren't executives scared of a public option any more? Because the public option as written in the two bills which contain it is so weak that it will not have significant, if any, pricing power.
The public option originally proposed by Hacker would have had over 100 million people enrolled in it. The current one would have, according the Congressional Budget Office, just over 10 million. No one with an employer plan would be allowed to join, it has no pre-enrollment, reimbursement is not linked to Medicare, doctors are not required to take it if they also take Medicare, and so on.
I'd rather not have it if I were an insurance company exec, because once it exists it could always be improved, but in its current state, I certainly wouldn't be scared of it.
The fact that at least one insurance company executive isn't scared of the public option shouldn't be a cause for celebration, it should tell you that the public option has been horribly compromised.
Last night two of the blogosphere's brightest lights posted on the difficulties Obama is facing when it comes to turning around U.S. Afghanistan policy. Digby, who recounted a 1964 conversation between McGeorge Bundy and President Lyndon Johnson about the futility of American policies in Vietnam, seemed aghast that "Democratic strategist" Donna Brazile was on CNN yesterday seemingly reading some leftover talking points from Karen Hughes about the need to stay in Afghanistan and "get the job done." Then last night Daily Kos' most prescient Afghanistan blogger, Meteor Blades, highlighted the controversy over Andrea Mitchell's report on the 500,000 troops needed to do the job in Afghanistan.
But as Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), our No Means No guest today, asked me this morning, "What is the job?"
Blue America's friendship with Eric Massa goes back to the very beginning of our PAC and he was one of the first candidates we ever supported. Ultimately it was his character that moved us to endorse him, although his championing of issues impacting the real lives of working families (like "fair trade" over so-called "free trade"), his dogged support of single-payer health care, and his spot-on analysis of the war in Iraq based on experience as a Naval officer are what first drew us to him. He came close in 2006 and he triumphed in 2008-- in one of the only districts in New York that Obama didn't win! Obama tool 48% in NY-29 while Massa scooped up 51% against a multimillionaire incumbent and Bush tool.
In June, Eric was one of only 32 Democrats to vote against the supplemental war budget -- of the 90 who had pledged to vote no. It was an incredibly courageous political act, particularly in a district with a daunting R+5.48 PVI (one of the most Republican districts in the country represented by a progressive Democrat). This morning Eric told me in no uncertain terms that he would "continue to vote against any supplemental."
We're not going to fund any wars in a way that no one knows about. The Republicans gave the wealthiest Americans the largest tax cut in history and then launched two wars without any idea of how to pay for them. It was the most fiscally irresponsible action they could take-- and they took it.
Eric is fired up and full of fight, as always. He loves his job and told me he's absolutely committed to it. "I'm in the right place in my life doing the right job for the right congressional district. And I'm just getting started." Right now, you hear the lifelong military man in him when he says he's very supportive of what he calls "the president's strategic pause to formulate whatever strategy his administration will implement (in Afghanistan)."
For instance, is this about fighting the Taliban or fighting al-Qaeda -- two distinctly different groups -- or is it about creating a democracy, or is it about protecting the Afghan people? These are very different missions that require very different resources. And until we know what we're doing, we cannot begin to get it done. The first thing a military officer asks is 'What is the mission?' And as of right now, that is a very legitimate question."
As progressives and men and women of common sense, we should demand a strategy that turns the destiny of Afghanistan over to the Afghans so we can get out of there as soon as possible. If the condition of our departure is creating a Jeffersonian democracy, then we are on a fool's errand.
Eric is joining us now (in the comments section) as part of our ongoing series on Afghanistan policy at Crooks and Liars. As MoveOn mentioned in the mailing this morning, "U.S. policy in Afghanistan has reached a pivotal moment. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about the Afghanistan war in the next few weeks. And there's a big debate happening right now about what to do. Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the administration -- including John McCain and Joe Lieberman -- are calling for a big escalation. The general in charge of Afghanistan is expected to request tens of thousands more troops, and that may just be the beginning. They're cranking up the pressure for an immediate surge."
Eric Massa is in a unique position to help us figure out a progressive strategy for dealing with this dilemma. He's adamant that if the President asks for more funds for the war, he do it through a normal budgetary process that includes a "clearly articulated strategy with an end game. The Republicans say they're all about fiscal responsibility? Then they should agree we should apply those concepts to wars."
Please take a look at Blue America's No Means No! page and consider donating to Eric and any or all of the 32 other Democrats who have already done the right thing by voting no on the supplemental budget 3 months ago and who we will be counting on to help end the occupation of Afghanistan in the coming months.
NationalJournal.com's panel of top political bloggers was asked to join in the survey of National Journal and The Atlantic Wire about which columnists, bloggers and television or radio commentators most helped to shape their opinion or worldview. No one received votes from both the left and right; of the 63 people named in total, only 23 appeared on more than one of the 22 combined ballots.
Related coverage: See how National Journal's panel of 375 Political and Congressional Insiders responded.
LEFT-LEANING Total points
Paul Krugman 23
Rachel Maddow 16
Frank Rich 13
Bill Moyers 11
Digby 9
RIGHT-LEANING Total points
Charles Krauthammer 27
Rush Limbaugh 24
Mark Steyn 18
Jonah Goldberg 11
Eugene Volokh 9
UPDATE: As a side note, I used to be on the National Journal's voting list, but didn't have time to vote on all their polls so I didn't cast a vote or her total would have been higher. She is the best and the brightest writer we have in the liberal blogosphere and even if you do not agree with all her takes you can be sure that she's always thought provoking. Bravo Digby.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters at a Thursday briefing that she was glad to see the Senate making progress on its version of health care reform but she emphasized that the House plan would look markedly different - by including a public option.
"I fully support the public option. The public option will be in the bill that passes the House," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said purposefully.
By including a public health insurance option in the House version, Pelosi will set up a confrontation between the House and the Senate when they meet in conference committee to hash out the differences between the two bills.
We have a long way to go, but the blogosphere is keeping up the pressure on the public option and it's helping.
And Cilizza has some new polling numbers on health care, but Digby is puzzled by his framing.
Chris Cilizza writes that the numbers on health care haven't actually changed much over the past two months in spite of the August hoohah. And then he sagely notes:
The Gallup numbers provide a worthwhile reminder that even while Washington is consumed with the daily back and forth over health care, the public at large is less invested in the tit for tat inside the Beltway. And, they also suggest that for all the doom and gloom talk regarding how Americans view Obama's health care plan, there may well be room for the White House to pull out a victory on the legislation.
A signing ceremony in the Rose Garden -- and the resultant favorable media coverage -- could well be the last (only?) time some Americans pay close attention to the health care debate and give the president a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Well isn't that good news. But I'm a bit puzzled. Cilizza himself writes in the same piece that polls show that a majority support Obama on health care reform --- and always have. Why in the hell should there need to be "room" to "pull out a victory?" And what "jaws of defeat" is he pulling victory from?
This is typical beltway narrative building. Despite the fact that the teabaggers have done everything in their power to change public opinion, it hasn't worked. Despite the fact that the Republicans have vowed to do everything in their power to kill health reform, it hasn't worked. Despite all the "doom and gloom" talk in the media, people still support the bill and every vote in the congress that has been taken thus far has advanced the bill. But apparently all of this shows Republican strength and it's the Democrats who will be snatching victory from the jaws of defeat if they manage to pass the bill. Same as it ever was.
The teabggers have shown a dark side in America that was being hidden by the right and America is turned off to it. They have lost the debate, but they still have their Beck.
