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President Obama
Today, President Barack Obama is coming to Philly, where at least three groups are planning to greet him with a protest. Two of them are liberal — which is an interesting footnote in a larger story about how some liberals are growing more and more disillusioned with Obama, especially over issues like immigration, war and financial reform.
AIDS activists ACT UP Philly will be rallying against Obama, who is coming to Philly to fundraise, due to anticipated cuts in HIV/AIDS funding. (The group will also be protesting against Mayor Michael Nutter — who is expected to join Obama at a fundraiser at the Hyatt at the Bellevue — to demand funding for housing for people with AIDS.)
DREAM activists — who organize on behald of undocumented immigrant students — will rally for their own cause, as well to shake a fist at the federal government's Secure Communities program and its deportation of local Cambodians (whose experience was recently written about by City Paper).
And the Independence Hall Tea Party Association will be giving a finger to the "Obama economy," and possibly "showcase the unemployed" — which, they note on their Facebook page, is a "[lesson] learned from the left."
Should be interesting to see them side-by-side.
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| © Scott Weiner |
| You lookin' at me? |
Ice Cubes are all the juicy details A.D. Amorosi couldn't cram into Icepack. Read on to get yer gossip on.
By now, you know all about how Germantown-ians booed â really booed â Mayor Nutter during yesterday's "Moving America Forward" rally. And how President Obama had a streaker to dash balls-out through the crowd. No respect I tell you. But did you know that Joe Biden does a good Robert DeNiro âyou looking at me?â impersonation (above) or that Dem rep Bob Brady (there, along with Joe Sestak, Sen. Bob Casey Jr., Gov. Rendell; and Mayor Nutter) looks solid in Phillies print (after the jump)? My man, photog Scott Weiner kept the proof. Loogout for more WHOWHATWHERE stuff when Ice and Ice Illustrated hit on Thursday.
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| © Scott Weiner |
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| © Scott Weiner |
| Bob Brady (top), The Roots (above) |
A funny thing happened last night. For months I've been looking everywhere for this thing that I lost. I turned over seat cushions, rifled through drawers, upended furniture. Then I turned on Hulu and there it was â the president that I voted for last November, the guy for whom I spent hours and hours walking around West Philly knocking on doors, and whose victory my neighborhood celebrated with an all-hours, bongo-banging, community-bridging, trolley-stopping Baltimore Avenue rager.
Man, I fucking looked everywhere for that guy!
It was good to see him again, and if there's one thing you can take away from last night's State of the Union, it's that Barack Obama gives good speech. If he were president of a debating society, he'd have 90% approval ratings. I'd pay to watch the guy read out of the phone book. And if he could govern by teleprompter, I'd already be using my public insurance option.
Unfortunately, when he steps away from the podium, Obama seems inclined to leave governance in the stone hands of his largely useless party leaders, who have made such a mess of health care reform that they are in danger of losing their enormous congressional majorities this fall. Mistake one was clearly investing his political capital with Harry Reid's investment firm, which turned around and gambled the principal on Joe Lieberman's Connecticut Default Swaps.
Obama's problem so far is that he has governed in a way that pleases effectively no one â not this base, not centrists (who don't like the health care bill), and certainly not conservatives. In fairness, Obama could personally sign every piece of the official GOP platform into law, and the Fox News crowd would still hate him and ask to see his birth certificate every few minutes.
Last night was Obama's attempt to right the ship â to reassure the base that the administration's progressive goals remain in sight, and to regain the trust of centrists put off by the Landrieu Purchase and other unsavory elements of health care reform. And at its best, Obama's speech was a forceful defense of his administration's policies.
He defended the bank bailout while still holding the titans of Wall Street to account for their role in the financial crisis. "If these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need." He defended a foreign policy increasingly unpopular with his party's base. Doing so unapologetically can only win him admiration even from those who disagree with the policies.
The only moment anyone really cared about, in the wake of the Martha Coakley fiasco, came when Obama turned to health care. Observers expected him to retreat from the bill, at least a little bit, to give himself and his party some political breathing room. But instead he launched a full-throated defense of the reform on the table, and called on Congress to pass it. "Do not walk away from reform,â he told the attendant legislators. He told the crowd of GOP obstructionists and nihilists that if they had a better idea, they were welcome to bring it to the table.
If only he could have called out Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman by name, the two disgusting insurance company sycophants more responsible than anyone else for derailing reform, who were conveniently seated next to each other in what one commentator called "the axis of weasel.â Certain niceties, alas, had to be observed.
In perhaps the finest moment of the speech, he told Congress, "To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.â It was a refreshing signal that we won't be getting Bill Clinton's second term â school uniforms, blowjob scandals, and the kind of vanilla presidency that gets you 65% approval ratings without achieving a single damn thing.
One feeling you get from all this, though, is that the guy's going to have to stop putting out political brushfires with speech water. It's one thing to right the campaign ship with a well-time and thoughtful speech, as Obama did with the Reverend Wright affair. It's another to confuse speechmaking with policymaking, or to believe that one can effectively substitute for the other.
In other words, actions twist more arms in the Democratic caucus than words. The problem with the health care bill isn't that Obama isn't delivering good enough speeches, it's that reform was left out in the cornfield like a scarecrow, and predictably got picked at.
So if last night was Obama rushing out of the White House with a shotgun to scare away the birds, that would be awesome. But along with a number of increasingly disillusioned supporters, l'll believe it when I see it.
My thoughts on the Obama SOTU: Obama - STFU (please).
Thought that was pretty clever, eh, Sally?
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Want to watch the State of the Union with other people? Of course you do, this shii is gonna be scarier than a Wes Craven flick.
Here's a link to watch parties in the area.
Below is a more specific invite to those in the Center or South Philly area.
Do you have plans to watch President Obama's State of the Union address tonight?
Local volunteers are organizing an OFA Watch Party in Philadelphia -- and you're invited.
We know this is a huge moment for our country, and in tonight's speech President Obama will lay out his vision for the way forward. Join us to watch with fellow OFA supporters, huddle on the phone with former campaign manager and White House advisor David Plouffe, and plan out next steps together.
Can you come tonight? Click here to RSVP.
Here are the details:
What: State of the Union Watch Party
Where: 703 S. 5th St.,
Apt. BWhen: Wednesday, January 27th
8:00 PMWant to attend a different Watch Party? Click here to search for other events near you.
Hope you can join us,
Jeremy
Jeremy Bird
Deputy Director
Organizing for America
The thing about Rep. Joe Sestak is, he talks fast. Particularly when he gets worked up. And he was, in fact, worked up. And when he calls your office, without warning, and you have no chance to rig up some sort of recording contraption, you have to scribble down as much as you can, then go back and try to interpret your own chickenscratch/shorthand later. But anyway. I spent about 20 minutes this morning talking with the congressman/senate candidate — "call me Joe" — about, well, a bunch of things, but all centered around the idea of the Democrats' relative ineffectiveness to get things done, and what he thinks should be done, both short and long term, about the Senate's structural flaws — namely, the idea that, despite an 18-seat majority in the upper house, and 78-seat majority in the lower house, and control of the White House, Democrats still have to bend over backwards to accommodate the likes of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and now, Cosmo centerfold Scott Brown to get a universal health care package through is, for lack of a better word, preposterous.
This is probably the best visual representation of the ridiculousness of the current system I've seen:
But before we get to the interview, take a minute and go read this. I'll wait.
For those of you who don't have an hour or so to reading one of those 8,000-word essays The Atlantic is so famous for, here's the part Sestak wanted me to see when he cited the piece, repeatedly, during our conversation (I'm quoting in more length that I usually would for someone else's work, so please clink the link above and give James Fallows the page view; good journalism and writing should be rewarded):
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative "earmarks,â and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson's analysis and called this enfeebling pattern "demosclerosis,â in a book of that name. He defined the problem as "government's progressive loss of the ability to adapt,â a process "like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.â
We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson's wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson's warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque —and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it's unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the "saucerâ George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might "cool,â into a deep freeze and a dead weight.
The Senate's then-famous "Gang of Six,â which controlled crucial aspects of last year's proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states —which together account for 20 of the Senate's 100 votes.) "The Senate is full of ârotten boroughs,'â said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. "We'd be better off with a House of Lords.â
The decades-long bipartisan conspiracy to gerrymander both state and federal electoral districts doesn't help. More and more legislative seats are "safeâ for one party or the other; fewer and fewer politicians have any reason to appeal to the center or to the other side. In a National Affairs article, "Who Killed California?,â Troy Senik pointed out that 153 state or federal positions in California were at stake in the 2004 election. Not a single one changed party. This was an early and extreme illustration of a national trend.
On rereading Mancur Olson's book now, I was struck by its relative innocence. Thinking as an economist, Olson regarded the worst outcome as an America that was poorer than it could otherwise be. But since the time of his book, the gospel of "adapt or dieâ has spread from West Point to the corporate world (by chance, Olson's Rise and Decline was published within weeks of the hugely influential business book In Search of Excellence ), with the idea that rigid institutions inevitably fail. "I don't think that America's political system is equal to the tasks before us,â Dick Lamm, a former three-term governor of Colorado, told me in Denver. "It is interesting that in 1900 there were very few democracies and now there are a lot, but they're nearly all parliamentary democracies. I'm not sure we picked the right form. Ours is great for distributing benefits but has become weak at facing problems. I know the power of American rejuvenation, but if I had to bet, it would be 60â40 that we're in a cycle of decline.â
What I have been calling "going to hellâ really means a failure to adapt: increasing difficulty in focusing on issues beyond the immediate news cycle, and an increasing gap between the real challenges and opportunities of the time and our attention, resources, and best efforts. Here are symptoms people have mentioned to me:
⢠In their book on effective government, William Eggers and John O'Leary quote a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, Michael Keeley, on why the city is out of control. "Think of city government as a big bus,â he told them. "The bus is divided into different sections with different constituencies: labor, the city council, the mayor, interest groups, and contractors. Every seat is equipped with a brake, so lots of people can stop the bus anytime. The problem is that this makes the bus undrivable.â
For that same book, Eggers and O'Leary surveyed members of the National Academy of Public Administration, a counterpart of the National Academy of Sciences for public managers. Sixty-eight percent of those who responded said that the government was "less likely to successfully execute projects than at any time in the past.â
Essentially, the argument here is that the institutions of American polity have grown structurally deficient, as politicians cater to special interests and ignore the public good, a la Olson. You could add to it the increasing polarization and cleavages of the two major parties (one of the best, and newest explanations I've read is here), and the dysfunction and myriad of problems that often come alongside populist movements (this thought-provoking book, by former Chestnut Hill College historian John Lukacs, a self-described reactionary who — although I fundamentally disagree with his take on rights and liberties — lays out a strong case that populist movements are dangerous and short-sighted; it's certainly a view the Founding Fathers shared) and you've got a recipe for a slow, but uncontrollable, burn. Or maybe not. As the Fallows piece notes, predictions of doom and gloom are part and parcel of the American experience, and hey, we're still here.
But, on the other hand, there's the reality that health care reform, so desperately needed and a central plank of Obama's 2008 campaign — you know, the one in which he won some 70 million votes — is about to being watered down because the Democrats only control 59 percent of the Senate, and because of an anachronistic rule that has been used and abused by the Republican minority in an unprecedented manner, they know have to beg for scraps from the likes of Mitch McConnell.
Last night, I put my thoughts into an e-mail to Sestak's press office, asking for his take on health care strategy and cloture rules. This morning, the congressman gave me an (unexpected) call. Below, I'm going to reconstruct this conversation to the best of my ability. Sestak's not quite signing on to junking the old Senate rules, but, he says, he's thinking about it, in part because of the Fallows piece, and in part because of the inordinate power the current system allots to egomaniacal dickbags (my words, not his) like Lieberman.
"I've said for a long time, we don't need to reform America. We need to reform the Senate," he says.
The Massachusetts election, he continues, wasn't a rebuke to Democrats or an embrace of Republicans, but rather, "the same evidence that I saw in my 67-county tour [of Pennsylvania] in July. People don't trust Washington." Particularly, he suggests, it's not so-much about policies themselves so much as the nature of the place, an environment where Ben Nelson can secure goodies for his home state in exchange for his vote, or — of course he brings this up — Arlen Specter's past votes as a Republicans are ignored the second he switches jerseys.
There is, as Sestak sees it, no inherent faith in Congress; consequently, as legislation as necessarily complicated as health care reform becomes bogged down in a morass of giveaways and special favors, this distrust is exacerbated into a sea of populist (and perhaps deserved) anger at the powers that be. And then you get Massachusetts. (It's worth noting, as Sestak does, that the Mass. election was hardly a mandate for Democrats to go slower on health care. In fact, a large majority of Obama voters who pulled the lever for Scott Brown, polling shows, favors the public option.)
In Sestak's words, the problem is, "Washington didn't change." Asked about what he thinks the Dems should do to push HCR now, Sestak offers something of a non-answer: "I would have helped shape the bill at the beginning."
OK, fine. But how should they proceed now? I was talking to Sestak a few minutes after he walked out of the morning Democratic caucus meeting. The consensus? "We have to continue, for the good of working people, to get a health care bill through." That said, he continues in almost the same breath in an echo Obama's comments yesterday, "I don't think we should just jam this thing through."
And what does that mean, exactly? "We should put through a package [that can] get through, we should do that," he says.
To Sestak, that means putting forward the bill's most popular items, and basically daring the Republicans to oppose them: eliminating the insurance companies' anti-trust exemption; prohibiting denial of care based on pre-existing conditions; banning the recision of coverage when insurance companies find out you're sick and don't want to pay; mandating that insurance companies spent 80 percent of premiums on health care; giving small businesses a tax credit. "Principled compromise," he calls it.
But you can't compromise with a brick wall, I reply. They decided long ago to make HCR Obama's "waterloo," thank you Jim DeMint, teabagger emeritus. At this point, I'm not sure what he could propose, short of another round of tax cuts for millionaires, that would garner a single Republican vote. (An anonymous Democratic Senate aide agrees with me: "Imagine we introduce a bill that says health insurance companies can't discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. All that would happen is the insurance industry would pay some firm to do a study that concludes that would cause insurance companies to go out of business, and some GOP senator will go to the floor and say 'See? This is all about forcing single payer.' Throw in some douchebag on TV with a tri-cornered hat and a chalkboard, and you have a unified GOP caucus against any bill that remotely attempts to deal with the health care issue.")
"I would lose my job in a heartbeat to get a health care bill through, in a heartbeat. ⦠If there were just some leaders. A Ted Kennedy could work with a Bush on immigration reform ⦠."
That means the White House, as well as Congress, Sestak says. And in any event, wishing for bygone eras of cooperation and sanity and strong leadership doesn't make it real, and to be frank, it doesn't really get at my underlying question: How do you pass anything as complex as HCR in a body as dysfunctional as the United States Senate, where you basically need 60 votes to take a bathroom break?
One option, of course, is for the House to pass the Senate's version word for word. If the leadership calls for that, Sestak says, "I will look at it and make a determination. ⦠There are some good things in that bill." This doesn't seem too likely. The liberal blogosphere is, as I write, buzzing with news that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will push portions of HCR through via the budget reconciliation process, which means they can't be filibustered. Republicans would raise holy hell, and David Broder would bitch about bipartisanship, but HCR would pass, easily and strongly — and it's not like W. never used reconciliation to pass trillion-dollar tax cuts that exploded the deficit — so tough cookies. And, as Sestak points out, this is too important to fail: "I don't think you come to a full stop," he says, though he doesn't think Democrats need to rush, either. In the Philadelphia area, he says, 66 percent of the uninsured are working. "Premiums have doubled. I believe we have to get something through. I will support what we can get through."
In other words, if the Dems go for the Senate bill, he's probably in. If they go for reconciliation, he's in. If they go for his preferred method, the more incremental steps outlined above that have a slight hope for bipartisan votes, he's in. But then he adds, "I won't sacrifice good policy at the altar of bipartisanship. But I do support bipartisanship."
So which is it, I ask. The Dems have, since the Tuesday vote, basically divided themselves into two camps: The damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead camp, and the let's-slow-down-and-try-for-Republican-votes camp. To which did he belong?
His answer, as fine a point as I can put on it, is whatever works.
But this brings me to the larger point: Americans are disenchanted with Washington because there's the perception that nothing is being done, and what's being done isn't good, and that special interests have all of us over the barrel, and that they're all corrupt and self-absorbed and out of touch. All valid observations, but the big one is this: Americans wanted to change the way DC works, and instead, they get Ben Nelson's favors and Bart Stupak's antiabortion zealotry and Lieberman's seemingly endless ability to string Dems along and Max Baucus' lobbyist girlfriend and the excise tax and no public option and compromise to the point of near-meaninglessness. How would a Senator Sestak go about fixing that?
Much of the American system, he ruminates, is set up to protect minorities. (This is sort of true; although, according to a fascinating history I'm now reading, it was actually set up to protect southern slave plantations at the expense of everyone else.) "I don't want to change it right now," he says. "I want to get over there, and see about it. We need some leadership."
Here he points me to The Atlantic piece above. "Honest to gosh, I thought of you," he says."Maybe, I'm thinking seriously — you know the Democrats will [one day] be in the minority — I am taken with [Fallow's notion that] the institution of the Senate is the only place that hasn't changed [in 200 years]. I don't think you can just go from 60 to 51. There has to be some balance. Maybe some changes are needed, right? We could be sacrificing good policy for an arcane rule."
The flip side, he says, is that in the House, an abundance of power in vested in the party leaders — the Speaker, Majority and Minority leaders, specifically. "I don't want the Senate to be that way. It's less democratic. What's the right mix? That's what I'm going to try to work out."
And before I could ask him if the constant refrain about needing leadership meant that he would support someone other than Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader — assuming Reid survives his re-election bid, which is by no means a given — he excused himself for a meeting. Next time.
Oh, and just so you don't think we're biased, I asked one of our correspondents who's in with the Specter campaign to put these same questions to his staff. We'll let you know what he comes back with.
Why Joe Sestak defends the filibuster rule is beyond my comprehension. "Maybe, I'm thinking," he says, "you know the Democrats will [one day] be in the minority." If the legislative agenda of President Obama continues to be sacrificed on the altar of Senate tradition, then the Democrats will soon be in the minority. And the Republican majority in the Senate will be under no obligation to keep the filibuster rule just because the Democrats chose to handicap themselves with it. Fifty-one votes at the start of a new Senate session can abolish the filibuster and make it possible to pass legislation with a simple majority. Given the strident rightward direction of the Republicans in recent years, you can bet that when they have 51 votes in the Senate, they'll eliminate the filibuster rule rather make their agenda subject to the veto of the 40th most liberal member of the Senate. Maintaining the filibuster rule doesn't protect Democrats from the misrule of a future Republican majority. It just makes it impossible to implement the agenda President Obama and the Democrats in Congress were elected to enact, putting the success of the Obama presidency in jeopardy, leaving the massive Obama grassroots base disillusioned and making the promises of aspiring Democratic office holders like Joe Sestak sound hollow because they're so unlikely to be fulfilled.
Why not offer up meaningful tort reform. Couldn't that garner 2 GOP votes? Two reasons Coakley lost 1) correct: distrust of Washington and any one party in power 2) Mass already has forced health care, they know it costs billions more than advertized Finally, the assertion that Dems have not abused the power of needing 60 votes in the same manner as the GOP has over this issue is simply absurd. If that were correct, you would have privaitized social security, a permanent repeal of the estate tax, tort reform for medical malpractice, and best of all perhaps Harriet Meiers on the Supreme Court. Thank God for the Dems
Hey Mike! How's Florida? And Kinsley? I miss our little backyard duels. As to your assertions: 1.) Mass has health care. And it's indeed so terrible that no credible politician is seeking its repeal. Kind of like Canada, where single-payer sucks so bad that even the conservatives embrace it, at least as a fundamental concept. 2.) Tort wouldn't have gotten them two votes, particularly if they sought a public option in return. The Rs were lining up against this thing from the get-go, no matter what. Who would have jumped? And if they put tort in there with nothing in return, the House Dems would have defected. Mike, really, you know the game better than that. 3.) The following legislation was passed with fewer than 60 votes during the Bush years: * The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 passed 54-44 * The Energy Policy Act of 2003 passed 57-40 * The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 passed 51-49 * The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 passed 54-44 * The FY2006 budget resolution and Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 passed 52-47 * The Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act passed 55-45 * The FY2007 budget resolution passed 51-49 Until 2007, the record number of filibusters in a congressional session was 58 (this includes the so-called nuclear option time). In 2007-2008, the first session after the Dems took over — and even when the Rs still had a reliable veto in the White House — they filibustered 112 times. The 60-vote threshold is not sacrosanct, my friend.
Each of the above vills you mention did get 60 votes for cloture Each of those bills you mention also contained sweeteners to entice those 60 votes. While I am not armed with the amount of research you have, you know I am correct. Tax cuts, giving seniors a new benefit, and free trade are all items that some dems will support.
sorry, forgot to mention that the fam is great, Florida is 80 degrees and sunny today, and for your new readers, the screaming matches between your new ultra liberal writer and myself, the huge Libertarian, are the thing of legend.
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A LINE IN THE SAND - From jacksmith - WorkingClass My Fellow Americans and People Of The World A strong Government-run MEDICARE like Public Option is STILL! CRITICAL! We have had a long hard struggle to find out what would be the BEST! that this congress and the Whitehouse could do to fix our highly dangerous, poor quality, most costly, and MOST! disgraceful healthcare delivery system in the world. It is clear that congress can do much more for the American people than what is proposed so far. It is clear that congress can pass a strong GOVERNMENT-run public option CHOICE. Available to everyone on day one. Expand Medicare and not levy any new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. LET THIS BE YOUR LINE IN THE SAND! Lastly, there can be NO! INDIVIDUAL MANDATES without a strong Government-run MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. Or the American people WILL! and SHOULD! revolt with an all out CIVIL WAR against congress and this Government. House and Senate progressives and the tri-caucuses should aggressively push for the inclusion of a strong Public Option, Medicare expansion, and no new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. If the obstructionist kill meaningful healthcare reform, then you should kill this bill. Because it will be far worse than the healthcare disaster we have now. It's failure will be on the obstructionist heads. And they will be punished and replaced. WITHOUT A PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE, THIS BILL WILL KILL FAR MORE AMERICANS THAN IT WILL SAVE. What is proposed in the Senate bill is the worst case scenario for health-care reform. It would shift trillions of taxpayer, public and private dollars into the hands of the private insurance industry (The single most costly, deadly and dangerous product sold in America). And it would compel by law millions of Americans to financially support this oxymoronic criminal enterprise. You cant have a individual MANDATE WITHOUT A STRONG PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE! You will have NO! realistic way of controlling cost and quality. Cost will continue soaring through the roof bleeding the American people dry, and KILLing our economy. And our quality of healthcare will continue to decline below our current ranking of "WORST! quality of healthcare delivery in the developed World". From the very start, the American people have been crystal clear about what they wanted. They wanted a humane single payer system like the rest of the developed world has (HR676). Or at least a humane strong GOVERNMENT-run public option CHOICE!! This is what the American people gave the democrats control of the house, control of the senate, and control of the Whitehouse to do. Those of you that can, should prepare now to remove every member of congress that fails to support YOUR healthcare reform with a strong Public Option, Medicare expansion, and no new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. Run against them in teams if you have to. But take them out. And replace them with a strong single payer or PRO PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE candidate. Now! is the time to bring maximum pressure on your members of congress. Contact your representatives and spread the word. The Public Option http://tinyurl.com/yfftf76 H1N1 IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION! I have to tell you now that the H1N1 virus is a man-made WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION! and TERROR! It is a WEAPONIZED version of a flu virus. It has swept the planet infecting millions. And causing a global pandemic that has killed tens of thousands, and injured millions. The H1N1 virus is the product of the DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! It was released in the U.S. in Texas in early January of last year, but not recognized until around April 2009 in California. The reason I know this is because when it came to America, it came to see me FIRST! How sweet... This was around the time the MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! assaulted the Whitehouse with all their devils deals to cripple and weaken YOUR! healthcare reform. Especially your right to have a single payer system like HR676 (Medicare For All) which most of you wanted. They don't even want you to have your HUGE!!! compromise position of a strong government-run MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. To compete with their DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN, MURDEROUS, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT PRODUCT (The single most costly, deadly and dangerous product sold in America). They also wanted to take away your rights to have your government meet it's responsibility to use it's full power to regulate, negotiate, and control drug cost, healthcare cost and quality. Something every other civilized country in the developed World has done for it's people. Their Greed! moral degeneracy and lack of patriotism knows no bounds. Many of you will remember that before we knew about H1N1. I posted a open message to the President and Congress warning them to be vigilant about their health, and cautious about any medical advice they received. As I said then "they will not hesitate to try and hurt you". The U.S. and the World have been under a BIOLOGICAL TERROR ATTACK! for over a year now. It is CRITICAL that We The People Of The United States take away control of our healthcare system from the GREED DRIVEN MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! For our own National security, and the security of the world. A Strong, government-run, MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. Available to everyone on day one, with the full unfettered power of the federal government to regulate, negotiate, and control cost and quality. Would be the most workable way to deal with this global crisis at this time. Including patent suspensions as needed for national security or the greater good. As an American I invite the peoples of the World to help us fix our healthcare crisis. And bring pressure on our government to meet it's responsibility to protect global security by controlling, and removing the corrupting influence of GREED and the PRIVATE FOR PROFIT motivations from healthcare in the U.S. and around the World. I call on the governments of the World and the global intelligence community to track down these MASS MURDERERS, and bring them to justice. CONNECT THE DOTS! And be vigilant that they don't slip in another viral strain on you under the cloak of H1N1 sequestration. Further, the proposed patent protection on biologic's must be stripped from the US bill. And greatly shorten/restricted, or abolished completely. This is a grave danger to humanity and global security. I think President Obama is doing the best he can at playing the disastrous deck of cards he inherited from the previous administration. And I think he is doing an excellent job. But the wolves and devils of the medical industrial complex! are trying to exploit, and take advantage of his good heart, and desperate desire to help suffering Americans. But we must be strong and insist that healthcare reform be done right for the American people. Or everyone loose's. This is all I can say in a message post. I'll try to find a way to tell you more later. God Bless You My Fellow Human Beings jacksmith - Working Class p.s. The so-called nominal H1N1 virus is designed in such a way as to make it more lethal to children and young adults. The medical community must be more vigilant of secondary bacterial infections in the young caused by H1N1. And remember, a viral infection is also a transfer of genetic code to you. Think about it, and be vigilant. :-(
Why can't we have a fusion of Democrat & GOP ideals, in something like "Reaganomics For Renewables"? Eliminate the corporate tax at the federal and state level on all renewable energy companies. Eliminate payroll taxes for employees of those companies. Energy independence, global warming & unemployment - SOLVED.
I think things are going to have to get so bad that constitutional amendments are brought about to change the operating system of DC. The most important amendment we should get (immediately) is the line-item veto. The GOP gave the line item veto to Bill Clinton in the 90's but it was taken away by the supreme court - so an amendment is the only way to make it stick. States like Florida have the line-item veto and they balance their budget year after year. The line-item veto would eliminate presidents having to accept or deny entire bills; they could send back the ugly pieces and parts for congress to vote on separately and pass only if they really wanted to. It would certainly stop the practice of larding up bills with bridges to nowhere, cornhusker kickbacks and louisiana purchases. The production of legislation would be a lot more efficient & better for Americans under such a system at the end of the day.
You should be very proud of taking notes from a PR-fueled conversation, retyping them and then linking to another person's article. Notify the Pulitzers.
[...] Specter’s primary challenger, Joe Sestak, who I work for, also doesn’t want to change it right now, but will “see about [...]
[...] the rest of his caucus. Also, Specter’s primary challenger, Joe Sestak, who I work for, also doesn’t want to change it right now, but will “see about [...]
[...] the Senate and its arcane and undemocratic rules, and how a super-minority is essentially able to hold up and stymie any substantive progressive. For instance, health care. Scott Brown wins an election in Massachusetts, and suddenly it takes a [...]
So here we are, the day after: liberals desperately seeking an answer for how they lost Ted Kennedy's seat — to a tea-bagging, waterboard-loving, American Idol-fathering, former Cosmo centerfold, no less — and conservatives touting this as a wholesale national rejection of everything Barack Obama has ever done. And everyone seems to think the health care bill is finished.
The latter first: It's not.
The former is a more complex thing to understand. It's not so simple to say that everyone hates Barack and took it out on Martha Coakley. Nor is it correct, as is permeating its way through the liberal blogosphere, to say that the whole of the blame rests on Coakley's absolutely terrible campaign, though some of it surely does. Special elections are strange things. Special elections, fueled by populist outrage, although often mis- or un-directed but focused on the party of power anyway, in an atmosphere of 10 percent unemployment and a two-year recession, are incredibly strange things that produce strange results.
My guess, to take up the proverbial sports metaphor: It's not so much that the Democrats got outplayed. It's more like they decided to not put their starters on the field until there were two minutes left in the fourth quarter and they were already down by a couple touchdowns.
But we'll need a better answer than that. So, I've asked resident SmartyPants David Faris to dig into the numbers, and come up for an explanation for Scott Brown's inprobable victory. It's set to appear in our Jan. 28 issue (by which time it will be old-ish, but hey, deadline cycles). In the meantime, feel free to prognosticate below.
Oh, and by the way: Brown will be up for re-election in 2012. I've got $20 that says he gets less than 45 percent of the vote. I've got another $20 that says Obama will be re-elected with a larger share of the popular vote than he got in 2008 (that's 53 percent, for the record. Any takers?
- JCB
Scott Brown getting elected in the "bluest of the blue states" involved a) exploitation of all of Obama's failures up to the point (no Olympics, winning the Nobel Prize for doing nothing which is ultimately a failure, "systemic failure" of the homeland security system to catch the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber, failure to treat terrorists as enemy combatants in the Global War on Terror by giving them taxpayer funded legal representation & constitutional rights), b) exploitation of Obama's broken promises on healthcare reform - ie. transparency & all hearings broadcast on CSPAN, letting Nancy Pelosi run the show instead of Obama & his own staffers managing and micro-managing the process and c) electability of Scott Brown who is not an elitist, connects with the common working man, has a beautiful family, and is more moderate on social issues. His nude / semi-nude spread in the 1982 Cosmopolitan magazine no doubt helped also. .....So there you have it - how a republican can win in the bluest of the blue states.
I also don't remember Scott engaging in bash / smear / lie / drive-by politics, which Jeffrey Billman is so good at in his blog posts. Maybe people in the northeast are starting to value integrity and humility again with their politicians.
re: Maybe people in the northeast are starting to value integrity and humility again with their politicians. That's doubtful. They voted in a Republican.
Yeah and let's not forget the Senator who occupied this seat for 46 years was all about integrity and humility. LOL!
re: Yeah and let's not forget the Senator who occupied this seat for 46 years was all about integrity and humility. LOL! You should be laughing at the voters who pulled the Republican lever. Can you believe there are still people that stupid?
After what the Democrats could have accomplished, but didn't, with their power chokehold, those Republican voters actually seem like a Society of Geniuses, Allan.
Sally, Does that mean you accept my wager? :)
I will accept your wager Mr. Billman...because I think Scott knows Massachusetts better than you do.
re: After what the Democrats could have accomplished, but didn't, with their power chokehold, those Republican voters actually seem like a Society of Geniuses, Allan. Only if you don't have a brain.
Mr Smithee: You cite the stupidity of people voting Republican. What about the stupidity of people voting for the same Democrat for 46 years only bacause of his name? Or that in any Philadelphia mayoral election to routinely vote straight Democrat? If that is not stupid I am not sure what is. Is that alright as long as it is not for a Republican? Go back to being angry.
@ Jen re: Go back to being angry. You're confusing me with a teabagger. Are you one of them?
Mr Smithee, Sorry, I am not a teabagger. I simply take issue with your generalizations. You are stirring the pot and coming across as a douchebagger. Very truly yours, Jen
Dear Ms. Jen, re: I simply take issue with your generalizations. You are stirring the pot and coming across as a douchebagger. Why, because I think people who vote Republican are stupid? Take a look at their platform: http://www.gop.com/2008platform/ Sincerely, Allan Smithee
How long until Allan answers a question with the I'm Rubber You're Glue approach?
Mr. Smithee, Love to chat some more but my lunch break is over and I need to get back to work. Copying and pasting from others on this thread or from the GOP platform position is not an indication of great intellect nor will it sway my earlier opinion of your real motive.
This would be funny if it weren't the saddest, most frustrating, most infuriating thing I've ever seen. A reporter wanders the grounds of the 9/12 Tea Party protests in Washington D.C. and mostly lets these outraged citizens hang on their own words.
Best footage I've seen of the insanity yet.
We need Obama to find a way to ban this kind of thing. Maybe it can be regulated as a safety concern, or an environmental thing. And don't give me that "free speech" bs - there need to be limits. This is just insane. People shouldn't be allowed to do this sort of thing.
And to think these people have the intelligence to sort through the issues and actually vote. It is important to allow for free speech and I can't say that stopping this is a) leagl or b) would change anything. The best thing for the Administration is to let these good people speak their mind to reinforce why the "moral majority" must be kept from ru(i)nning our country.
In all fairness, I too have laid awake at night wondering who all these "czars" report to, and how much money they make. But, mostly, I wonder where the f**k they buy those awesome hats. And for that matter, is Jason Kay from Jamiroquai in fact a czar? So many questions. I'm going to need a bigger sign.
Fuckin kommies, eat shit and die! When you were throwing your feces all over W and that pallin dudette and basically at whoever tried to talk some sense into you, it was OK, it was freedom of speech. Now, when your opposition reacts to your bullshit, you suddenly want a BAN on these kind of protests. Why don't you scum-vermin-subhuman-good-for-nothing-parasitic-tapeworms go fuck yourselves and fuckin' die, ha?
FUCK ALL YOU HIPPIES GO HUG A TREE AND KILL YOUR SLUTTY FRIENDS BABY.
^LOL^
xxx and MALTA, your guy lost. Obama is president now and even though he has a lot of Bush's mess to clean up, he's still trying to make things right for the poor who have been short-changed for too long. Hopefully he will give illegals a quick path to citizenship and lock in a democratic majority for good. It looks like the game is about to CHANGE - get used to it.
Republicans or conservatives pride themselves on getting higher education and thus deserving to keep the money that the earned through their education. However this video makes me ashamed to associate myself with the likes of these people. In a word: IGNORANT. . . OK 2 words: IGNORANT & SHAMEFUL... may I also add selfish and greedy too?
Remember when it was easy to know where you stood?
That's how I feel, anyway. For the last few years, I wouldn't have had much trouble picking out which bumper sticker was for me, and I suspect the same was true for many Americans.
You were for invading Iraq, or you were against it. You were pro-choice or pro-life. You thought the Republicans were criminals for protecting the rich from taxes; or you thought the Democrats were a bunch of pinkos out to take away your God-given right to get rich yourself somehow.
And — by election time, at least — you were for Obama, or you weren't.
Now, the Big Issue is health care: and it's a lot trickier.
Are you pro "public option?" What does that even mean? Is President Obama even pro-public option, or what? (He named it last night, to much applause, only to quickly say he was open to alternative ideas â including, presumably, no public option.)
Do you insist that any health care plan passed by Congress be deficit-neutral? If so, why? Aren't we getting something for our investment? And what exactly was your fiscally tough stance on the last eight years of military action in Iraq?
By insisting that all Americans carry mandatory minimum insurance, is Obama forcing big government on you? Or is he protecting your wallet from the costs associated with people who who wind up getting their health care at the emergency room?
Personally, I don't know where I stand on plenty of these and other questions, because frankly, I don't know how to weigh various consequences against each other. And I know I'm not alone. But behind these very complicated questions are a few more fundamental ones that are, perhaps, a little easier for most of us to answer.
Should the government make sure that no American is left without any protection if he or she gets sick? Should the government force insurance companies to stop rejecting/dropping consumers with pre-existing conditions? Should we, as Americans, help pay something to make sure fellow Americans have basic protection from physical calamity?
For me, the most important word in this debate isn't cost (which appeared at least 25 times in the president's speech, by my count), but a world that appeared only once, and which had to be delivered by a dead man.
It came when Obama quoted from a posthumous letter by the late Senator Ted Kennedy: "What we face ... is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."
A moral issue.
Before we can start figuring out whether a collection of health care co-ops is preferable to a public option, or whether tort reform (my head spins at the very sound of such phrases) needs to be part of the package, I think we need to ask ourselves whether this is, in fact, a moral issue.
Because if it is — if the real question here is whether it is right that Americans might not be able to get care when they need it — well, at least that's a start.
I think it is a moral issue. I say so because I have friends who are uninsured, friends who were dealt unfortunate and expensive diseases — and because the American dream is one of "liberty and justice for all."
When we profit in America, we profit from each other, and we benefit from the opportunity that our collective society creates. I think justice dictates that we take care of each other, too.
 |
| nj.com |
*CP was asked to change the title of this post; since the event was open to all â and therefore un-"crash"-able â we said ok.
Muffled applause, shouts and cheers could be heard above the fiddle band playing at West Philadelphiaâs Millcreek Tavern last night as seventeen Obama supporters congregated in an upstairs room to watch the president deliver his health care speech at a "watch party." The event was coordinated by Organizing for America, the post-election incarnation of Obamaâs political machine, which now exists to promote the presidentâs agenda.
These were not, obviously, people who needed to be sold on the president's health care proposals. They beat Nancy Pelosi to the applause several times, and booed the dour Republicans. The harshest criticism levied against the speech was that it had not occurred early enough to avert weeks of misinformation and congressional inaction.
"It was indeed a speech that, had it been given months ago, would have prevented some of the vacuum, some of the distortions,â said attendee Dennis Jaffe.
Part of the idea of such an event is of course to rebuild â or re-harness â the record-breaking volunteer base that fueled Obamaâs presidential campaign, which at its height enlisted approximately 2.5 million volunteers.
Organizing for America hasnât attracted quite the same following. Alison Hirsch, who arranged last nightâs watch party, admitted that "weâre building back up again.â
Most who volunteered for Obamaâs presidential campaign still support the president â but taking the time to volunteer on his behalf is another question.
Elliott Griffin, a student at Temple University, discovered this firsthand while trying to get former Obama volunteers involved in Organizing for America over the summer.
In a "sign of the economic upturn,â Griffin rather optimistically said, two or three out of the hundred people she called each day had been unemployed during the campaign but now had jobs — and hence could not resume their volunteering activities. Then there were the occasional former volunteers who, alienated by the lack of a single-payer option in Obamaâs health care plan, didnât want anything to do with Organizing for America.
"I got both people who would say, âIâve been waiting for you to call, where have you been?â as well as people who were so drained from the election they didnât want to pick up another phone,â recalled Griffin.
She won one new potential volunteer last night. Jaffe didnât volunteer for the presidentâs pre- or post-election campaigns, but after last night, he said, he hoped to get more involved.
"This is an extraordinary, extraordinary opportunity,â he reflected. "And thereâs still such a huge lack of understanding [of] the proposal.â
Health care or not, Iâm partisan to a president that can lower my taxes and fix what the housing market "greedâ created⦠Just get the job market back up and avoid more scamsâ¦
I hope that this health care bill is as good as the president says it is.
Tonight President Obama will do what he does best and get in front of the cameras and talk to America (actually, he's talking before a joint session of congress, but same diff, right?). The topic of his 8 p.m. speech is, of course, is healthcare. The big challenge, however, will be how to address the moronic misinformation masquerading as debate without actually calling its perpetrators morons. Unless maybe he should call the people who perpetuate myths like Death Squads (please!), Nazism (come on!), socialism (every advanced DEMOCRACY already has universal health care) and unnecessary complexity (we already HAVE that in our current system) what they are.
There are several watching parties scheduled in the area, and you can find them at Organizing for America, but for starters, there's one at Rotten Ralph's, one at the Millcreek Tavern. Remember how involved people used to be with the Obama web site — hosting parties and volunteering — and now not so much? Maybe that's part of the problem the big guy's having getting his healthcare stuff through. The zealous have become content, and the discontented whack jobs have become the zealots.
Where are you watching the speech? You are watching it, right?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Grant Evans, philly news now and Yancey Grantham. Grant Evans said: Uh, no. Melanie Oudin's playing! RT @citypaper: You are watching President Obamaâs healthcare speech tonight, right? http://is.gd/35tlb [...]
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