CANNONFIRE

Maybe Xenu runs ACORN...?

2009-11-20T10:50:00.000-08:00

I am no fan of Barack Obama. I would have preferred a McCain victory in 2008. And I wrote posts critical of ACORN during primary season.

Even so, I cannot freaking believe the latest polls: The majority of Republicans -- and some 26 percent of the overall electorate -- think that ACORN stole the election for Obama. By comparison, only 13 percent of the country thinks that vote fraud helped propel Bush to victory in 2004.

(Those 13 percenters are almost certainly right, by the way.)

C'mon. Get real. In 2008, the Democrats could have won even if they had nominated Squeaky Fromme. What need of vote fraud?

The Republican party gave the country an unpopular war and an economic meltdown. (Alas, a lot of people now seem to forget that both the catastrophe and the bailout occurred before the election. A lot of people also can't remember the date when 9/11 ocurred. Americans suck at chronology as much as they suck at geography.) John McCain, for reasons best known to himself, ran the softest, squishiest Republican campaign in memory. His inability to pretend to be a religious nut depressed the religious nut vote.

Are we to believe that ACORN could engineer massive vote fraud in a number of states -- faking up hundreds of thousands of votes, maybe millions of votes -- without access to either the machines or the tabulators? Are we to accept that this brobdinagian degree of vote burglary occurred without a single instance of cheating being detected by the Bush Department of Justice? Were there any significant telltale discrepancies between the actual vote totals, the pre-vote polls and the exit polls?

I'm continually stunned by humanity's ability to believe in hallucinations. The majority of the American people are also under the impression that you can end a recession by combating the deficit. (These same people couldn't get worked up about massive debts during flush times. When Dick Cheney said that deficits don't matter, did any Republicans care?) Worse, a growing percentage of the citizenry thinks that Democrats caused the recession.

We shouldn't make fun of the Scientologists for believing in Xenu. Most of your friends and neighbors accept fairy tales that are every bit as risible.

Peter DeFazio for President! (I'm serious.)

2009-11-20T00:08:00.000-08:00

Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio is the first prominent Democrat to call for the firing of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the two Obama administration officials who gave Wall Streeters all the KY Jelly they needed to rape the taxpayers. DeFazio's candor impresses me. In fact, I'm so impressed that I want to run the words "DeFazio for President in 2012" past my audience.

Yeah, I know how most Americans will react to this suggestion: "Peter who?"

Perhaps the better question is: "Who else?"

Well, there's Obama. Believe it or not, I'd love for him to get his act together. I'd love to vote for a newer, smarter, better Obama in 2012. In all likelihood, though, his poll numbers will soon head into George-Bush-2007 territory. (And here's why.) That popularity plunge will, sadly, tar anyone connected to his administration -- including Hillary Clinton (who would make a fine president) and Joe Biden (whom I still like even though you probably don't).

2012 may resemble 1968, when Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race due to his unpopularity. If RFK had picked up the nomination, Nixon would have lost. Instead, the candidate was Hubert Humphrey, a good man saddled with the unhappy job of being LBJ's veep. Many Dems thought that a vote for Humphrey was a vote for a continuance of the Johnson administration (and of the war).

We know what happened back then. That's why we need an outsider in 2012.

But we also need an insider -- someone who has spent many years in D.C., someone who knows how the system works. Both Dubya and Obama have taught us the dangers of inexperience.

Peter DeFazio is definitely a maverick. He's not part of what the Corrente bloggers call "Versailles." Yet he has been in Congress since 1987 -- and before that, he worked for Representative Jim Weaver. He knows his way around.

He comes from a purple-tinged rural state. I doubt that many country folk in the red states could ever really come to hate him, not in the way they instinctively hate big-city Easterners.

He did four years in the military during Vietnam. He has an unambiguous record of opposing gun control. He wants a big increase in pay for active-duty military personnel. He is a church-goer but not a religious nut.

All of this serves to preempt the more obvious lines of right-wing attack.

If Obama fails as badly as I think he'll fail, if populist outrage over the Wall Street handouts continues to gather force, then the Democrats in 2012 will be desperate to find someone in the party who opposed the Obama economic team from the very beginning. Alas, nearly all of the Democratic opposition came from Blue Dogs whose conservatism would alienate the progressive base and the netroots.

There is but one exception: Peter DeFazio. Let's look at the record:

He opposed the Iraq war from the start. He didn't just give one (1) speech against the invasion, as Obama did. He voted against it.

He offers genuine opposition to free trade agreements.

He opposed the stimulus bill because "I couldn't justify borrowing money for tax cuts." (Most Americans don't know that much of the stim bill went to tax cuts, not job creation.) This principled opposition sent Obama into Al Capone mode. He warned DeFazio: "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother."

That bit of Chicago-style thuggery could prove golden for DeFazio in 2012.

Here's DeFazio on TARP back in January:

I was wrong. It was actually worse than I thought it could be.

The reference goes to the first bailout vote, during the waning days of Bush. (Isn't it odd how many people now forget that this vote even occurred? And it was only a year ago!) DeFazio voted against the October, 2008 TARP plan "emphatically," offering a much more sensible alternative. He was not taken in by the NOW NOW NOW propaganda which was so prevalent at the time.

You know, what did we get for $350 billion? I mean, that's the question my constituents are asking. And that's now the question my colleagues -- even those who supported it -- are asking.

RYSSDAL: How are you going to vote this time when the second $350 billion comes up?

DeFazio: Well, first, today, I want to see these very strong restrictions put in place. But I'm still not inclined to vote for it. I wanted two amendments that aren't being allowed. I would have split the money and said, "OK, here's part of it. Let's see what you do with it." And then, secondly, I still want to impose a minuscule transfer tax, something we had in this country throughout the Great Depression, throughout World War II, up until the '60s, on stock transfers. It wouldn't hurt people in 401(k)'s. And legitimate traders it would be one-quarter of 1 percent, so Wall Street could pay to bailout itself.

That transfer tax -- a tax on stock trades -- is something I have advocated in a number of previous posts. Such a tax would have held in check the insane computerized trading we've seen recently, trading which enriched Goldman Sachs unfairly and led to an utterly distorted market. This proposal would have saved the taxpayers a lot of money.

His opposition to TARP makes him one of the few Democrats that right-wingers will listen to -- hell, even Alex Jones has had him on his show. Yet DeFazio's opposition to "corporate socialism" -- to Goldman Sachs and environs -- will endear him to all true liberals.

DeFazio would not be a perfect candidate. On the issues, he has made one major mistake: He voted for the House health care reform bill, which, if passed by the Senate, will soon be very unpopular.

He's not young. He's not colorful. His rhetoric does not soar. He looks and sounds like a guy who should be running a neighborhood grocery store.

But he has one thing in his favor -- a penchant for being right.

Some of my feminist readers will automatically disqualify him from consideration on the grounds that he has committed the sin of penis-ownership. I hope that his record will make his genitalia forgivable.

No-other left-wing Democrat -- not even Kucinich -- has so consistently and loudly opposed Obama's economic mismanagement. In 2012, many disillusioned progressives who had once backed Obama will thank all of heaven's angels that Peter DeFazio has compiled such a principled resume.

Fire Timmy and Larry!

2009-11-19T13:19:00.000-08:00

At last, a Democrat who makes sense. Peter DeFazio is a hero -- a good populist. (I apologize for not presenting this video clip earlier, as I should have.)

I want to see this message on t-shirts, coffee mugs, buttons and bumper stickers: FIRE TIMMY AND LARRY!

And while you are making up those bumper stickers, see both this excellent BBC documentary on "The Greed Game" and Ian Welsh's excellent post on the same topic. The bottom line is the same: The banks which received bailout funds will use the money not to get the economy going again but to buy up undervalued companies. Welsh has some common-sense suggestions regarding how to fix the problem, but he doesn't expect any action:

Why? Because everyone knows that fixing the problem will end the gravy train for a lot of very rich people. A lot of very rich people who give a great deal of money to Democrats in general, and gave a lot of money to Obama in particular. If the cost of keeping that gravy train and the donations it enables going is tens of millions of unemployed people, well, so be it. Because serious people know that real change isn’t going to happen under Obama or under this Democratic Congress, so there’s no point in even talking to people who might suggest it.

If only DeFazio -- not Obama, not Pelosi, not Reid -- were the face of the Democratic party. We have been betrayed.

The ghost of Reagan

2009-11-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

In the NYT, Nicholas Kristof offers a good piece on the reaction to Medicare legislation back in the 1960s. Medicare was called "the beginning of socialized medicine."

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”

All of these prophecies, like so many other conservative predictions, were proven wrong. Republicans had earlier peddled similar nonsense about Social Security.

(Speaking of hyperbolic predictions, am I the only one who recalls the NRA poster that popped up all over California in the 1980s, when a gun registration proposition appeared on the ballot? The poster conflated Holocaust imagery with the words: "First register the guns -- then register the Jews.")

The Daily Howler points out an important omission in Kristof's column: Ronald Reagan receives no mention. Reagan, now the subject of so many Republican hagiographies, made anti-Medicare pronouncements that one can only describe as totally bugfuck insane.

First you [the governement] decide that the doctor can have so many patients. ... So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town, and the government has to say to him, "You can't live in that town, they already have enough doctors, you have to go live somewhere else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. Pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school where he will go or what he will do for a livin, but will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do. ...

And if you don't [stop Medicare] and I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.

Yet Ronald Reagan is now revered by many older Americans who depend on Medicare. They also depend on Social Security, brought to this nation by Franklin Roosevelt, whom the Republicans, the Freidmanites and the fundamentalists continually demonize. On the right, it is an article of faith that FDR caused the Depression -- as though Herbert Hoover had not been president for four miserable years. I wish Americans who believed this nonsensical revisionism would have the decency to refrain from cashing their Social Security checks.

Incidentally, the above clip from Michael Moore's Sicko does not specify (as it ought) that Reagan's recorded diatribe against socialized medicine was prompted, in large part, by the Medicare debate.

At the Howler, Bob Somerby writes:

We’re always struck by how long disinformation campaigns can persist without any real attempt at rebuttal by the liberal world. Why are these types of complaints still effective today? Because the liberal world has been so inept at fashioning counter-messaging. Example: Very few voters have ever heard the ludicrous predictions Reagan made. That’s because the liberal world has never had the first idea how to fashion political movements: How to spread information, potent messaging, frameworks for understanding.

Somerby is being a tad unfair. People on the left can create a political movement: The Obama hysteria of 2008 proves the point. I didn't like that movement, but it was a movement. (At issue is the question of whether it was truly a left-wing movement, since so many "former" libertarians were in charge of catapulting the propaganda.)

Beyond that, it seems unfair for Somerby to carp about an inability to fashion killer counter-arguments to popular right-wing fantasies. Instead of dissing others, why doesn't he school them on how to do the job right? He's been in business for the better part of a decade, and he hasn't figured out a strategy. All he can do is tell the truth as best he sees. That's all I can do. That's all most of us know how to do.

Obviously, that tactic is not good enough.

Earlier this year, those who argued in favor of nationalizing the too-big-to-fail banks could not reach the ears of those who made the decision. We told the truth as we saw it, but we could not create a movement.

Those who created the "Obama as socialist" propaganda meme do not care about mere truth-telling. They are in the advertising business. They have a product to sell -- an image, an idea. A movement.

We now face two big battles, and we have precious few resources with which to fight the ghost of Ronald Reagan:

1. Medicare for all. If the current health "reform" bill in congress fails, we must renew the fight for single-payer. Even if the current reform bill succeeds, we must still fight for single payer, because the American people will soon express their outrage at mandates and fines. We cannot let this bad bill define the left.

But with what weaponry shall we do battle? The Democrats depleted their stores of ammunition fighting for Pelosi's stupid legislation. The logical first step would be to concentrate on the state-by-state approach -- California and Vermont are ready to lead the way.

Alas, the ghost of Ronald Reagan remains a formidable opponent.

1. A real stimulus. Obama's stim package failed for one simple reason: Too much of it did not go toward the creation of jobs. It went to tax cuts, grants, unemployment benefits, and so forth. Can you think of a modern-day equivalent of the TVA or the WPA that was created by the stimulus bill? Mr. Obama, you ain't no FDR.

Yet now the conservatives can claim that what they are pleased to call "socialism" has been tried and has failed. Obama has clearly signaled that there will be no jobs-creating "Stim II" package, because the we've already gone too deeply into debt. The Republicans have made further stimulus politically impossible. They have convinced the nation, and perhaps the administration, that now is the time to pay back the unpayable deficit.

As Ed Harrison of Naked Capitalism notes:

The President just doesn’t seem to understand how the economy works frankly. Reducing deficits by cutting spending or raising taxes decreases aggregate demand. And it is a decrease in aggregate demand which would induce a double-dip recession.

Once again, we confront the ghost of Reagan. In this instance, however, the host is Janus-faced.

Face 1 depicts Reagan as the apostle of small government and balanced budgets. This was the face he presented to the world when running for office.

Face 2 is the real Reagan legacy, as summarized by the immortal words of Dick Cheney: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

Except when a Democrat is in office, facing crushing unemployment. Then deficits matter.

Your health and the economy's health

2009-11-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

Nice to see Michael Moore finally free himself from his illusions about Barack Obama. Too bad he couldn't give up his delusions about Hillary back in 2008.

On other fronts...

Brad DeLong used to scoff at the suggestion that we could enter a new Great Depression. Now he thinks that such an outcome is possible...

We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by recapitalizing the banks again. But the failure of the Fed and the Treasury in the aftermath of Lehman to grab a share of the upside from its capital injection and purchase operations for the public in the form of warrants means that there is no coalition anywhere for a repeat or anything like a repeat of propping-up the banking system: the right thinks it is an unwarranted intervention in the free market, the left thinks that it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the center is bewildered because it is an enormous and poorly-structured intervention in the market, it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the optics are terrible.

So if another big bad shock hits the U.S. economy, what could the Obama administration possibly do?

Nothing. The new president had an enormous opportunity in the first half of 2009, and he squandered it. Future historians may one day recognize Obama's refusal to nationalize the "too big to fail" banks as the greatest mistake ever made by an American president -- greater, perhaps, than Dubya's decision to invade Iraq.

AIG was semi-nationalized, but only as a giveaway to the great Wall Street financial firms. So says Neil Barofsky, the Special Investigator General for TARP:

The SIG TARP report noted that "structure and effect of the FRBNY's assistance to AIG ... effectively transferred tens of billions of dollars of cash from the government to AIG's counterparties."

Barofsky seems to be one of the few officials that has to tell us what we already know: TARP is "almost certainly going to be a loss" for taxpayers and Geithner rolled over for Wall Street in the AIG negotiations.

Krugman sums it up:

Brad DeLong says that the loss of public trust due to the kid-gloves treatment of bankers has raised the probability of another Great Depression, because the public won’t support another round of bailouts even if it becomes desperately necessary. I agree — but I think the bigger cost is that we’ve greatly increased the chance of a Japanese-style lost decade, with I would now give roughly even odds of happening. Why? Because bank-friendly policies have squandered public trust in all government action: try talking to the general public about stimulus, and it’s all confounded in their minds with the deeply unpopular bailouts.

By itself, the AIG story would be damaging enough. But it’s part of a pattern — and that pattern has ended up undermining the economy’s prospects, big time.

Even Krugman doesn't see the irony. It's true that the public no longer trusts government action; what's worse is the public sees that the public sees all action as socialism. So tell me -- in what book is kowtowing to Wall Street considered socialism? Well, maybe in some insane book written by Cleon Skousen and hawked by Glenn Beck. But any actual socialist would have been appalled by Larry and Timmy's scheme of transferring public monies over to the world's worst capitalists.

The noxious aroma created by the bailout now perfumes any moves that could actually benefit the working class. Obama turned an historic opportunity into an epic FAIL.

On the bright side: Goldman Sachs has formally apologized for its role in the crisis. Thanks, Goldman Sachs! It's all better now!

About damn time

2009-11-18T07:24:00.000-08:00

Nick Xenophon -- an Australian senator with a name right out of Marvel comics -- calls Scientology a criminal organization and has demanded a full investigation.

The South Australian parliamentarian said he had been contacted by a number of former Scientologists after questioning the organisation's tax exempt status in a recent television interview.

Senator Xenophon said their correspondence implicated the organisation in a range of crimes, including forced imprisonment, coerced abortions, embezzlement of church funds, physical violence, intimidation and blackmail.

In one, Paul David Schofield said his first daughter, Lauren, had died after she was allowed to wander around one of the Church of Scientology's Sydney buildings and fell down some stairs.

Mr Schofield's second daughter, Kirsty, also died, in this case after ingesting potassium chloride at the family home - a substance he said was used widely in the organisation's "purification" programs.

In another letter, Aaron Saxton said as a member of the organisation he participated in the "forced confinement and torture" of others.

I had heard about the forced imprisonments conducted by the so-called "Rehabilitation Project Force" -- although as I understand it, Hubbard usually enforced this policy on the high seas, during his Captain Bligh period. However, this is the first account I've run into concerning Scientology's use of potassium chloride, which is used to kill people during executions by lethal injection. I wonder what the Hubbardians are doing with the stuff?

If you check Google Video, you'll find some good documentaries about Scientology, most of them produced by the BBC. This 1967 video shows Hubbard flat-out lying on camera about his previous marriages. The true facts were a matter of public record, and Hubbard knew that. Moreover, he knew that his interviewer knew. Yet he lied anyways, contradicting himself -- and actually seemed to believe what he said at all times. That's the scary part.

This recent ABC investigation would tend to buttress Xenophon's allegation. Check out the "salute the dog" section!

KSM in NY

2009-11-17T10:14:00.000-08:00

Why didn't the United States agree to have Khaled Sheikh Mohammed tried in an international war crimes tribunal? Perhaps because the U.S. does not want to lose control of the proceedings. If control were lost, certain little-discussed aspects of the case might come out -- such as the fact that the CIA has been holding KSM's young children hostage for years. As a released document revealed, the CIA told KSM that his children would be killed.

Given the circumstances, we may expect a quick guilty plea. Certain right-wing pundits are screaming that KSM could engineer a successful defense. Such claims are pure propaganda.

Obama will toss us to the YAFs (Added note on risque Chinese public art)

2009-11-17T06:43:00.000-08:00

Reversal of Fortune: Mexicans are sending money to their poor relations in the United States.

Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter Candelaria in North Carolina.

At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the United States, more money is going out than coming in.

So what's Obama gonna do? He's going to go on a fact-finding mission -- a nationwide tour -- one which will take months to complete. (Thanks, lambert.)

With the nation's unemployment rate at its highest level in 26 years, President Obama plans to bring together CEOs, small business owners and financial experts to sound out ideas for continuing to expand the economy and create jobs.

In other words, he's going to go around the country looking for more YAFs to talk to. Well, it beats actually doing something.

And what's a YAF? That's my new pet acronym: YAF -- Yet Another Friedmanite. (As in Milton Friedman.)

Wherever you go in the United States, whenever you turn on the radio, you run into a YAF. You can find pro-war YAFs and anti-war YAFs, insider YAFs and counter-culture YAFs, right-wing YAFs and left-wing YAFs, atheist YAFs and fundamentalist YAFs. The Obama administration is at least 80% YAF. The anti-Obama teabag movement is 100% YAF. YAFs are the thesis and the antithesis -- and thus any conceivable synthesis must be a YAF synthesis. They are on every side of nearly every issue, yet they all serve the same purpose: They exist to tell you that Keynesianism is the problem, not the solution.

After what the YAFs did to Russia, Chile, Iraq and the United States, you'd think that their Miltonian movement would be discredited by now. But the YAFs, through some YAFfy magic, always manage to present themselves as the exemplars of an untried ideal. They've been spewing YAFfiness for decades, yet they always convey the shock of the new. And every disaster they have created is ascribed not to Friedmanism but to the lack thereof.

Your home's on fire? Pour on some gas. It'll put the flames out -- or so the YAFs keep telling us.

A subsidiary of the YAF infestation is the YAL (Yet Another Libertarian) phenomenon. The internet presences who foisted Obama on the world -- Moulitsas, Sullivan, Aravosis, DAH-link Arianna, and possibly Marshall -- all began as YALs. Maybe they still are.

China: Paul Krugman is one of the few prominent non-YAF voices out there. You should read his recent piece on China's intentionally weakened currency.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

I'd be even more worried if I were an unemployed American worker. Oh, wait a minute: I am.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

And that's exactly what will happen. Obama is under all sorts of pressure not to institute another stimulus. Instead, all the conventional wisdom spewers insist that NOW NOW NOW is the time fix our unfixable deficit. And we need to raise interest rates NOW NOW NOW in order to fight inflation -- which doesn't exist. All of which means that SOON SOON SOON we will have 25% unemployment, maybe worse.

Okay. So if nobody in this country has a job, who will buy all that Chinese-produced crap filling up our Wal-Marts?

Or maybe...

(Let us recall our first story, the one about Mexicans bailing out their relatives in the U.S.)

...maybe the Chinese want to keep the yuan weak in order to make sure that Chinese WalMarts don't fill up American-produced crap.

Did you know that there are WalMarts in China? The photo to your left depicts one in Dongguan.

I spent some time this morning doing a Google Earth flyover of Dongguan and Guangshou and environs. Yes, I know that there were some very sizable layoffs there recently. Still, just about everything there looks prosperous, sleek, modern, clean, well-designed, impressively-sized and newly-built. How is China able to do it? Maybe because the political culture has managed to stay relatively YAF-free. If we want to fix the trade imbalance, we need to flood the place with Chicago School graduates -- pronto.

Meanwhile, folks in Mexico are sending relief aid to their poor relations in the U.S...

Added note: Wow. Public sculpture in Dongguan is pretty hot. Although the Chinese may be moving ahead of us, at least one Chinese fellow seems happy to be behind.

Woah!

2009-11-16T01:31:00.000-08:00

This blog normally publishes non-political material on the weekends, which means that this video arrives some 90 minutes over the limit line. But I just had to share this YouTube discovery, because it's the trippiest thing since Inland Empire. Does anyone out there know who put this sequence together...? (Feel free to 'shroom while watching, but don't hold me responsible for the consequences.)

Abortion and single payer (added note)

2009-11-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

I'm going to attempt an answer to a question I posed a couple of posts down:

Let us posit an alternate universe in which single payer, or something happily close to it, is under discussion right now in Congress. How would we handle the question of abortion?

I would want the procedure to be both legal and covered by nationalized health insurance. Yet I can muster up some sympathy for those who say that they do not want their tax dollars to support what they consider to be murder. Can you, as a mental exercise, cobble together an arrangement?

Many of my readers won't see the problem here. They will respond: Keep abortion legal, let the (posited) national health insurance program pay for it, and tell any complainers: "Suck that."

As quixote at The Confluence says of the instantly notorious Stupak amendment:

What if the amendment read, “Hair straightening is unnatural and immoral. No medical costs associated with complications can be paid for using any Federal tax dollars.” Would he be as tolerant of that viewpoint? Male circumcision is an unnecessary procedure whose only health benefit comes from compensating for poor hygiene (or, in the case of AIDS, from the unnaturally thickened skin of the glans). Would he be as quick to understand people with moral objections to the deformation of men?

Those examples are meant to be humorous, so I suppose it would be churlish to point out that circumcision prevents cancer of the penis (for which Dr. Edward Scissorhands can perform the only known cure), while the main complication of hair straightening is a chemical burn -- which, though rarely serious, stings like the devil. (I once had crazy ideas about taming my curly and gravity-defying beard. We will not discuss the results.)

As a matter of political -- not medical -- reality, we cannot equate abortion to any other procedure. On this topic, tempers reach surface-of-the-sun temperatures. Murder has been done. The national division of opinion is roughly even, and both sides refuse to grant the other even the faintest shred of moral legitimacy. The anti-abortion advocates have just as much contempt for their foes as their foes have for them. No-one will ever agree to disagree.

Partisans on both sides have but one message for their foes: "We're right; you're wrong; suck that."

You're a fool if you think that single-payer legislation -- already a contentious issue -- will come to pass if pro-abortion advocates take a "suck that" attitude toward anti-abortion advocates. It just won't happen.

Don't hit me with "should" arguments: I'm not talking should. It just won't happen.

Politics is the art of the possible, and your "suck that" fantasy simply is not possible. If, in your view, there can never be single payer legislation without "suck that," then single-payer will never, ever happen.

I don't like this situation, but I recognize its existence. Nevertheless, I think that any national health insurance scheme should pay for abortions.

What, then, to do?

First, let's figure out how much money we are talking about. There are under a million abortions in any given year in the United States. The cost is small: About $200-$400. Since a nationalized health insurance scheme will save money, let's use the lower figure. The overall cost of all abortions each year will be under $200 million. That's a piddling amount when compared to the overall cost of health care in the United States -- which, by my rough calculation, is somewhere on the order of (yow!) $2.1 trillion.

So it's just a matter of raising $200 mill. Or rather: It's a matter of making sure that the $200 mill won't come out of the pockets of those who cannot tolerate the thought of abortion's legality.

My proposed scheme is simple: Two national health insurance plans -- Plan A, for people who think that abortion should be legal, and Plan B, for those who think otherwise. Both plans will be paid for by taxes. Plan B -- the anti-abortion plan -- will cost less than Plan A. How much less? The difference will come to maybe a buck-fifty a year. In other words: If you are anti-abortion, at tax time you will get to keep six extra quarters, give or take two bits, and you can rest assured that not one penny of your money will go toward an operation you find abhorrent.

Won't everyone join Plan B, in order to save those sheckles? Nah.

The amount of money is negligible, and those who want to maintain the legality and availability of abortion are both numerous and passionate. Remember, we need to raise a mere $200 million. I think we can get to that goal easily.

What about women in the Plan B club who have a sudden change of heart due to an unwanted pregnancy? Let them switch over to Plan A at will; they may then have the abortion. But make sure they understand that they will be paying the extra $1.50 for the rest of their lives. They're on the A team now.

And don't presume that only women will join the Plan A club. A lot of men want to keep all options open, if only because a lot of men know what it's like to regret a drunken tryst. I believe that there will be just as many males as females who choose A.

Some of you are probably fuming. "If the anti-abortionists can withhold taxes on their pet issue, then why should I have to pay for our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan? That's unfair!"

Damn right it's unfair. I freely admit it.

But look at it this way: The current health care reform bill is a botch which will probably fail to pass the Senate. The reform debate will then go back to square one. And even if Obama does sign some sort of hideous "health" bill, the new plan will soon piss off most Americans, and many will demand reform of the reform. Again, we'll be back at square one.

At that moment, single-payer advocates must have their act together.

They will have a tough time being heard, because the conservative propaganda machine will shout with a million voices: "We tried socialized medicine and it didn't work!" Nevertheless, we must continue to fight for single-payer, for the simple reason that no other system will work.

The odds are already against us. Why would we want to do anything that would make the job even tougher?

If you insist on your "suck that" fantasy out of principle, then single-payer will never happen. It should, but it won't. If, on the other hand, you can bend your principles just enough to allow for my "Plan A and Plan B" scheme, then the impossible dream instantly becomes an almost-impossible dream.

Added note: I think some feminists will presume that only women will pay the extra dollar or two that Plan A requires, what with all men being pigs and all. According to this Pew poll, Democratic men and women supported abortion rights in roughly equal numbers -- until 2008, when a nine percent gender gap occurred. What's the reason for the gap? I don't know; one can only speculate. Maybe the poll numbers will be even again next year.

Now here's an interesting figure: Among men overall (Dem and Rep), 52% supported abortion in 2007. The number is now down to 44%. That's an eight point spread. A noted above, the drop was nine points among Democratic men. In other words, support for abortion dropped further among male Dems than among male Republicans. I wonder why?

Barely 50% of the women in this country support abortion -- a five point drop since 2007. The overall support for abortion rights is now a mere 47%, a worrisome figure. I don't think these numbers provide abortion supporters with a position of strength, frankly. I don't think 47 percent provides a good foundation for anyone who wants to say: "I think Pat Robertson should pay every bit as much as I do for nationalized on-demand abortions."

Come on. The difference between Plan A and Plan B is only a couple of bucks a year -- tops. It's not that big a deal!

Added added note: I looked again at the Pew poll. Interesting numbers on the religious front: Among evangelical Protestants, 23% support abortion rights and 71% say abortion should be illegal. (No surprise there.) Among those awful, awful Cat-licks, opinion is evenly split: 45% fer, 45% agin. Those numbers mirror the roughly even split we see in the overall population. Yet when liberals and feminists assign blame for atrocities like the Stupak amendment, guess which religious group receives the most venomous insults?

Catholicism. It's the religion everyone loves to hate!

Credit where due...

2009-11-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

I have to applaud Barack Obama for calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the saintly freedom fighter of Burma/Myanmar. Is this the first time any U.S. president has mentioned her by name?

Health shorties

2009-11-13T22:56:00.000-08:00

1. What if? Let us posit an alternate universe in which single payer, or something happily close to it, is under discussion right now in Congress. How would we handle the question of abortion?

I would want the procedure to be both legal and covered by nationalized health insurance. Yet I can muster up some sympathy for those who say that they do not want their tax dollars to support what they consider to be murder. Can you, as a mental exercise, cobble together an arrangement?

(Granted, our tax dollars are being used to support murder in Afghanistan and Iraq right now.)

2. Can Kucinich make it good? Dennis Kucinich wants his state-by-state single-payer approach to become part of a final deal with the Senate. Won't happen. Ah, but what if? Would a bad bill suddenly become worthy of support?

I say yes, it would. Of course, California probably would go single-payer early. If you live in Montana, you may have a differing attitude.

3. Want a filibuster? I do! I hope that the level of support in the Senate for health care reform is above 50 but below 60. To me, a number in that range would be ideal. Why? Because I don't much care for this bill -- but I do want to see a real, old-school filibuster. You know, one with Joe Lieberman entertaining us with a day-long telling of the Aristocrats. That kind of filibuster.

Why? Because a real filibuster would allow the Democrats to amend the rules of the Senate itself, in which case we would have, literally, the filibuster to end all filibusters. I've talked about this before. To change the rules, a two-thirds vote of all the Senators present is necessary -- and the whole point of being a filibusterer is to keep the opposite party (in this case, the Dems) in the room while most members of your own party (the Republicans) get to go home for booze and a snooze.

Picture it: Two-thirds of the senators vote, the rules are changed, and the very idea of a filibuster is gone, baby gone. We would once again have rule by a simple majority. That's the only way to get things done.

(Of course, that sitch would have drawbacks. In 2011, we may have a tea-soaked Republican Senate. The Dems would have no filibuster power against nutjobs who want to declare war on the Illuminati, confer citizenship on angels, and put Jesus on Mount Rushmore.)

4. A T-shirt? You guys serious? People have suggested that the "MS-Led" cartoon (scroll down) would make a nice t-shirt. I tried the t-shirt thing before; it did not go over well. In order to have a company manufacture and ship shirts from your own design, one must charge somewhere on the order of 20 bucks. I've never paid more than $10. Of course, I'm a cheap bastard.

Words and deeds: Obama and Iran

2009-11-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

Many disappointed Obama supporters maintain that the president has betrayed the progressive agenda he once espoused. I would counter that he never was a liberal -- he merely played one on TV.

One classic example: Obama's multi-facial attitude toward Iran.

His campaign duplicity has gained new relevance after the recent federal seizure of various mosques and a skyscraper in New York, due to alleged covert ties to Iran.

In this earlier post, we looked into Obama's shifting stances on Iran. I shall recap.

During his ever-so-brief senate career, Barack Obama co-sponsored something called the "Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007," which did not become law.This act was controversial because it identified the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

As you may recall, most prog-blog commentators considered any such identification reckless. The Revolutionary Guard is a national army, and we are supposed to be at war with terrorism. Thus, the act technically could be used to justify war with the Iranian army.

To placate leftish critics, Obama pulled off a neat trick. He did not reverse his co-sponsorship. He did not express regret or admit error. He did not really do anything. Instead, he gave campaign speeches opposing the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, which offered the same IRG = terror equation.

Those speeches sufficed to make the prog-bloggers happy. The bots did not notice that all Obama ever offered were words. Just words.

When it came time for action, Barack Obama made a point of not showing up for a vote on the Kyl-Lieberman resolution. In other words, he refused to take a stance that might come to haunt him in the general election.

It gets worse: Then-Senator Hillary Clinton passed around a statement intended to make clear that the Bush administration should not construe the Kyl-Lieberman amendment as an excuse for war. (At the time, everyone feared that Mad Dick and Little George wanted to justify heaving bombs at Tehran.) Hillary asked Barack Obama to sign that letter.

He wouldn't.

Nevertheless, many progressives formed the bizarre hallucination that it was Hillary who wanted war with Iran, while Obama (in their eyes) stood for peace and diplomacy.

When ambassador Joe Wilson (the husband of Valerie Plame/Wilson, who had been screwed over by the Bushies) scored candidate Obama for his Janus-like stance on Iran, the Obot brigades responded by smearing Wilson and his courageous wife. Daily Kos published a particularly mind-boggling reaction -- a comment which reflects the sentiment then prevailing within "progressive" circles:

Obama will NOT let the criminality of government remain the status quo.....Clinton would of covered up for Bush and the CIA etc like her husband did, Obama will NOT and Larry and his buddies and Joe and Valeries budddies may just be caught for whatever criminal acts they were part of.....

(The "Larry" here is, of course, Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst with whom I've fallen into severe disagreement. That contretemps is irrelevant to our story.) The above-quoted words were published in mid-2008. I still have no idea what "criminal acts" are to be laid at the feet of the honorable and brave Wilsons.

When Obama attained power, he got his revenge against Joe Wilson. Obama directed his Justice Department to halt the Wilsons' civil lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, who conspired to reveal Valerie Wilson's CIA employment. In essence, Obama provided legal cover for the chancred and leprous asses of Dubya's most vile henchmen.

And how did the progressives react? For example, did Randi Rhodes -- who spent years feasting on the Wilson/Plame scandal -- denounce Obama for siding with Dubya's evildoers against the people she had once championed?

No, she did not. At least not within my hearing. (If you know otherwise, please enlighten me.)

And that, my friends, is Barack Obama. He is a man who ran against the Bush/Cheney legacy, yet ended up protecting Bush and Cheney. He is a man who, on the issue of Iran, told lefties what they wanted to hear, yet consistently refused to match action to rhetoric.

Now Obama has taken what may be a provocative step against Iran -- and his actions seem to have won some very grudging respect from the likes of Michelle Malkin. Obama will maintain sanctions against Iran. The neoconservative Wall Street Journal is demanding that Obama end all attempts at diplomacy with Iran -- and the current federal seizures give the administration political cover for doing exactly as the WSJ prescribes.

Meanwhile, we have this disturbing note from DEBKAfile (that is to say, from Mossad):

Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama focused on the single subject of Iran when they met in Washington Monday, Nov. 9 - as did Netanyahu and French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 11. Iran also occupied the meeting between defense minster Ehud Barak and US defense secretary Robert Gates Monday. DEBKAfile’s Washington sources disclose that briefings to the media and joint communiqués were disallowed for the sake of blacking out the content of the conversations Israeli leaders held in Washington and Paris.

Leaked reports that the Palestinian issue and Mahmoud Abbas’ future were discussed in Washington and peace talks with Syria in Paris were window-dressing, as were the power games widely reported as leading up to the Netanyahu’s reception at the White House.

The conversation in Sarkozy’s private apartment at the Elysee was a continuation of Netanyahu’s talks with Obama two days earlier and marked their coalescence around the next steps on Iran.

Back home, the defense minister stressed the importance of “not discounting the peace signals coming of late from Syria” and said that “many barriers fell” at the Netanyahu-Obama meeting “recreating a good foundation for renewing the peace process and reaching accord with our Palestinian neighbors.”

This statement was part of the smoke screen set up by mutual consent to conceal the content of Barak and the prime minister’s overseas meetings. It was necessary to addressing the minister’s need to bolster his shaky position as leader of the left-leaning Labor party and lift Israel’s image in Europe which is fixated on the Palestinian issue.

At the same time, a very senior American official told DEBKAfile that his description of falling barriers between President Obama and prime minister was spot on and deserved a full stop.

After reading that, the timing of the New York seizures makes rather more sense, doesn't it?

Obama says that the recent federal action resulted from an investigation he inherited from Bush. Perhaps. We shall see.

What we know is this: As a candidate, Obama spoke like a prudent peacenik on Iran, yet his actions have always lurched toward neo-conservatism. His foreign policy mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, may be considered a neo-con of a certain type. Zbig is not Ledeen -- he's something different -- but that doesn't make him one of the good guys.

Obama's sponsorship of that once-notorious legislation (the one which placed the "terrorist" label on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard) makes the following piece of speculation worth pondering:

So is the Obama Administration involved in the attacks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard conference in Sistan-Baluchistan?

Note: Sistan-Baluchistan is a war-torn province of Iran, the home of a Sunni insurgency against the Shi'ite regime in Tehran. (It's also a key area in the heroin trade.) Intriguingly, an Al Qaeda-linked group named Jundallah has been credited with the attack on the Iranian Guard. If the Obama administration was (as the writer implies, and as the Iranians have plainly stated) the secret sponsor behind an attack carried out by an Al Qaeda ally -- well. This movie just became really intriguing.

One of the main forces behind the foreign policy of President Obama is Brzezinski, a realist and someone who has talked about Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all becoming destabilized, including in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2007. The concept of a geo-political “black hole” is also his. Also, the Iranian government has categorically stated that the U.S. and Britain where the forces behind the October 18, 2009 attacks on a dialogue amongst Sistan-Baluchistan’s Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim leaders sponsored by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Most likely the answer is yes. While the U.S. government is also negotiating with Tehran, America has not ended its covert meddling and destabilization operations against Iran. Barack Obama is continuing the last American administration’s proxy war on Iran from the Iranian border with Iraq to Sistan-Baluchistan.

Could proxy war lead to war war? Indeed it could.

Where, I wonder, is Hillary in all of this?

MS-leader

2009-11-12T03:56:00.000-08:00

Rape and mutilation: Is this true...?

2009-11-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

While traipsing through some corners of the internet where I normally do not traipse, I came across two startling (and vividly written) paragraphs on a feminist blog. The author was shocked by the contents of a Halloween "haunted house" walk-through attraction:

I suppose all of you readers are saying to your computers, “Duh, Nine Deuce, it’s a haunted house. What did you think was going on?” But you must remember that I haven’t been in a haunted house since maybe 1989. At that time, the average haunted house was just a series of dark halls in which drama club dorks with masks and plastic axes would jump out at you and say things like, “You’d better run for your life!” in their best attempt at a spooky muahahaha voice. Even when I was eleven that shit was basically whatever the opposite of scary is. But now it’s 2009, and we live in a world in which movies like Hostel, Saw 1-76, and the Halloween remakes (which are Rob Zombie joints, in case you didn’t know) make millions of dollars. I should have known that would affect the goings-on at the nation’s haunted houses. Stupid me.

Apparently, in the modern haunted house scene, rape is where it’s at. Kerry and Natethaniel told me that the haunted house’s “attractions” included a woman being brutally gang raped, women being tortured, women being murdered, a woman’s torso with the genital area completely mutilated, an exploding ass (I forgot to ask what sex the exploding ass was), and so on and so forth. All of the above came with plenty of blood. My friend Steve said that a better name for the haunted house might be “The Mutilated Vagina House,” and I asked him, rhetorically, why there weren’t more mutilated penises in the mix. He replied that no one would come, and he was right.

The writer then ladles on the usual ideological yada yada: "Is there really anyone out there who still denies the fact that pretty much everyone hates women?" Yeah. Me. I so deny. But I also recognize that hyper-paranoid assertions of that sort make some women feel better about themselves, just as many NOI members feel a great psychic steam-release when they assert in public that everyone with white skin is the devil.

My question is this: Are rape scenes really all the rage at spook houses right now? Or are we dealing with yet another case of an ideologist misrepresenting a single example as a trend?

I do not patronize such establishments, preferring to spend my Halloweens visiting alleged "real life" haunted locales. It's the one night of the year when I drop the skeptical curmudgeon persona and go ghost-chasing. (S'fun. And anyone who would deny me a little holiday fun can go screw.)

After some cursory googling, I could find no evidence supporting the notion that rape and genital-mutilation scenes are now de riguer at Halloween spook-houses. Oddly enough, the only articles which discuss rape scenes tend to focus on "Hell Houses" erected by fundamentalist Christian churches. However, my research is preliminary. Connoisseurs of such entertainments are in a better position to answer the question: Has this country institutionalized seasonal rape dioramas?

The piece quoted above does link to an adults-only "Chamber of Horrors" in Georgia which maintains this site. The very first photograph on that site (upper left-hand corner) depicts a classic tableau of female dominance/male submission. However, most of the other images do show women undergoing torture. Not my cup of tea. I'll remember these images next time some southerner tries to persuade me of the moral superiority of his ever-so-Christian co-regionalists.

I do agree with the passage about cinematic torture-porn -- a subject which I intend to address at length one of these weekends. At what point do we confess a causal link between that stuff and this stuff?

We've peaked

2009-11-10T12:26:00.001-08:00

According to the Guardian, a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency says that U.S., in an effort to forestall panic buying, has deliberately fudged the numbers concerning how much oil we have left. If this source is correct, then the fields now producing some 70 million barrels a day will be reduced to less than 30 million barrels a day by 2030.

Game over, dude. We need a new game.

Bravery (updated)

2009-11-10T06:09:00.000-08:00

I've admired Colleen Rowley -- former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower -- for years. But I never expected her to be brave enough to endorse a book like this. Bravo!

Update: I also have to congratulate Dennis Kucinich for the courage he has shown regarding the House health care reform bill. Check out his interview with Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s better than what we have now?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: No. Actually, it’s not, because it locks us into a for-profit system that the government subsidizes... This bill doesn’t effectively moderate what they can charge for premiums or co-pays or deductibles. It just says people have to have insurance. Well, insurance doesn’t necessarily equate to care, and care comes at a cost.

Obama says GOMER

2009-11-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the purpose of passing health care reform NOW NOW NOW is not so much to institute socialized medicine (as the teabaggers believe) but to get rid of already-existing socialized medicine.

We already have socialized medicine, of a sort, for the poor. The system took hold during those misty pre-Reagan years, when this country was saner, more charitable and more prosperous. The system is inefficient in that it provides only emergency care, not preventative care. And emergency room physicians are required only to stabilize the patient, who may require more comprehensive treatment.

Still, the impoverished need access to that emergency room. They don't pay for the emergency care they receive. They can't be sued for payment, because lack of property makes them judgment-proof; if they are lucky enough to possess an old car, they may be living in it.

Until we return to Keynesianism -- which we won't -- the numbers of the impoverished will continue to grow. That may be the plan. Even if there is no plan, that's where we are going. We will see growing income disparity, growing unemployment, a growing lumpenproletariat to keep wages low and job insecurity high.

Right now, the uninsured are billed three times higher than are insured patients. Usually, the taxpayers pick up the tab. (Michelle Obama helped to run a hospital in Chicago which did this sort of thing routinely.)

You can see the problem -- the real health care crisis. If you double the number of lumpenproles, you double the number of people reliant on socialized (emergency) medicine. The true owners of this nation would prefer for members of the peasant class to crawl into some corner and simply...die.

The Pelosi/Obama bill may, in effect, keep more poor people out of that ER. Call it the GOMER bill. GOMER is doctors' slang: Get Out of My Emergency Room.

Those without regular jobs take any temp gig they can find. Businesses large and small are firing regular employees and hiring freelancers. Right now, there are some eight million "independent contractors" in the work force. Some freelance by choice. Many freelance because they have no other option, because times are tough and a gig is a gig. I strongly suspect that the number of freelancers will swell during the next five years -- it may even double.

The public option is supposed to take care of all those workers not covered by employers or Medicare. Will it?

No.

In the first place, the public option will probably die in the Senate. Even if it survives, the public option will still cost money -- monthly payments which many cannot make. A freelancer may find work only half the year. Millions of Americans are "food insecure" -- that is, hungry. They can't afford health care -- hell, they can't even afford a dollar cheeseburger at BK.

And what about their dependents?

Consider this: If you fall off the social grid for a while -- if you spend a period homeless, living in your car, living in a friend's garage or on a sofa (and millions live such lives right now) -- you will likely stop paying taxes. Shocked? Then you've never been in that situation. When you're sleeping under a bridge, you have other things on your mind besides filling out a 1040.

When those who have fallen off the grid do find some form of freelance or "under the table" work again -- earning maybe $800 a month, just enough to survive -- they avoid filling out tax forms. They hide from the IRS not because they don't want to pay money to the government (they probably will owe little or nothing), but because they fear having to explain their "missing years" to the authorities.

"You see, sir, I didn't fill out my tax form that year because..." Yow. No-one wants to say those words. Ever. Better to stay under the radar as long as possible.

Those in this situation tell themselves that they'll make things right with Uncle Sam as soon as they start earning some decent money -- something more than $800 a month. Enough to hire a lawyer.

How many people are in this situation? I don't know. Perhaps nobody knows. I do know that roughly 140,000,000 citizens filed tax returns last year -- in a country of 300 million.

Consider the fictional case of Ellen. She spent a few years jobless, depressed and pretty much homeless. She got by somehow -- lived with a friend, shacked up with a guy she really didn't like, spent some time sleeping in an old Chevy Cavalier.

Now she's making some money again -- not much, well under $1000 a month. She is an "independent contractor" and the income is insecure. But she is (usually) able to pay $500 a month for rent and utilities in a shared apartment. She's not really back on her feet, but she has regained some small measure of dignity, even though she eats a lot of pasta.

Is she going to pay for health insurance? Probably not. Screw the mandate: This is survival. Will she apply for a hardship exemption? No -- for a reason which you've probably already figured out.

One night, Ellen is eating pork roast. (It's cheap.) And she feels something awful: A blockage in the esophagus. The food has gotten stuck on its way down, and now she feels as though someone shoved a boulder beneath her rib cage. She can't eat another bite. She can't even swallow her own saliva. She's in constant discomfort-bordering-on-pain.

Although she may not know the term, she suffers from a food bolus. A growing number of Americans experience this unhappy phenomenon.

What will happen to Ellen? Well, she could wait it out, despite the extreme discomfort. The bolus might dislodge itself within a day or two. Then again, it could stay right where it is. If it doesn't budge or dissolve, she'll eventually die.

She should go to the ER right away. But will she?

Under today's system of socialized emergency medicine for the poor, she probably would go to the hospital within 24 hours. But under Pelosi's plan, she knows that stepping into that hospital will mean paying an unpayable fine, because she can't afford to be on a health plan. And she's terrified to fill out any forms giving out her personal information, because the last year she filled out a tax form was the year she "fell off the grid."

So she stays home, spitting out her saliva every minute, unable to sleep, feeling ready to die. Maybe she ends up doing just that.

Well, screw Ellen. She didn't pay taxes. She didn't really contribute to the economy. It's not as though society owed her a decent job or a social safety net. Let the bitch die. Too bad the taxpayers have to fork over the money to put her underground.

Ellen's story has millions of variations, and all of them will play out in the coming years.

The jobs are not coming back, because both the Republicans and the Democrats consider the remedies (protectionism, Keynesian job-creation) ideologically impermissible. If there are X number of Ellens out there right now, there will be 2X by 2015. For most of those Ellens, the awful health care system we have now is preferable to the proposed reforms.

Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have sent a message to all of those Ellens: Get Out of My Emergency Room!

One final note: What about those who have stepped a few rungs above Ellen on society's ladder? Well, the failed Massachusetts experiment tells us what to expect from Pelosi's hellish admixture of mandates and penalties. Across the nation, we'll be hearing many more complaints like this one:

I am uninsured because even though I work full time I can not afford health insurance. My salary barely covers rent, childcare & utilities so I have not been to a physician in more than 10 years. During that time I have been to the ER once when I needed stitches. I paid for that visit out of my own pocket. Now I'm paying $1000 year penalty to the state on my taxes because I cannot afford to spend 50 percent of my weekly income on insurance. Ditch the whole insurance requirement. it's NOT working.

Eventually, health care reform -- if passed in the Senate -- will fail. The pundits will then all say with one voice: "We tried socialized medicine and it didn't work."

No-one will listen to those fringe-dwelling bloggers who insist that single payer -- the only workable system -- was never given a chance.

A Facebook mystery

2009-11-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

As readers know, I am no fan of social networking sites. I'm especially un-fond of Facebook, which was founded by the CIA's In-Q-Tel subsidiary.

Nevertheless, I just received a perplexing Facebook invite. Perhaps someone out there can help me to understand this enigma.

Someone whom I will here call "Jane Codfish" sent me the invitation. I don't know her. Never heard of her. Her public page reveals that she is Australian with an interest in left-wing politics. Jane is not mysterious in and of herself. But the invite also contains the words "See who else has invited you to Facebook," followed by six names and images (or avatars) -- and this is where the oddness begins.

One of those people is somewhat known to me on a personal level. Call her Elvira. She once took care of my dog for a while. She has never invited me to join Facebook (she respects my suspicions, even though she does not share them) and she has never written to me using her Gmail account, the only email account of hers that Facebook should know about. Her rare online writings do not reference me in any way.

Another of the six is Prissy Patriot, a no-longer-operational blogger who, like me, looked into the rumor that Dick Cheney was a client of Deborah Jeane Palfrey's. If I recall correctly, PP and I both interviewed Palfrey. I don't recall ever corresponding with Prissy Patriot.

The other four "invites" came from four people unknown to me. I can discover no connection whatsoever.

How could Facebook have divined the direct personal connection between Elvira and myself, even though that link has left no cyber-trail? And how could Facebook have known that Prissy Patriot and I were linked only in our shared pursuit of the Dick Cheney rumor?

Can Facebook read minds? Or does Facebook simply read a whole bunch of private email, using data mining software to knit together evanescent connections? Does this very post fit into some eldritch Facebook scheme? There is something really, really, really weird going on here...

Nancy Pelosi: World's worst haggler (Added material)

2009-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

This is mind-boggling. Blue Lyon quotes an email from HealthJustice, which was sent out in response to the withdrawal of the Kucinich amendment before yesterday's vote:

Speaker Pelosi felt that offering a single-payer amendment would open the floodgates to amendments proposed to limit abortion funds, restrict immigrant access to healthcare, and other regressive legislation.

And in the end...? To get her bill passed, Nancy Pelosi agreed to an amendment that would prevent women from paying for abortions with private insurance procured through their employers. And the legislation will likely become even tougher on immigrants in conference.

If I offered Nancy Pelosi ten bucks for her car, she'd give it to me for eight. If I were a Republican.

Update -- same planet, different universes: Indiana Republican congressman Mark Souder opposes the Pelosi Bill because

It is only a matter of time before the public option drives out private insurance and government becomes the sole bill-payer for health care services.

Oh, if only! The vampire squids of the insurance industry contribute nothing. That is the very reason why, on the other side of the aisle, Dennis Kucinich opposed the same bill:

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

Let's repeat: The public option applies to only 6 million Americans. Meanwhile, 25 million Americans require some sort of assistance in order to have enough to eat. Pelosi expects them to pay for insurance premiums -- and if they don't, they could go to jail for five years.

The lying never stops!

2009-11-07T15:06:00.000-08:00

I just turned on CSPAN's coverage of the health care debate. California's Buck McKeon (R) rumbled up to the podium and "quoted" Abraham Lincoln:

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong..."

And so on. As we have discussed previously, the quote is a fake.

Let me remind you of some things that Lincoln actually did say (links provided in my previous post):

“Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities."

Again I say: Sure sounds to me as though Lincoln would have supported single-payer.

Why do conservatives insist on living within a fake world consisting of fake quotes (Kaminsky's The Hoaxers cites plenty of examples), fake news (Fox), fake science (creationism, anti-global warming), fake fears (the Illuminati myth, the myth of Soviet aggression) and fake history (e.g., the "fundamentalist Founding Fathers" myth)?

It was also real, real cute to see Buck score Pelosi for not being bipartisan. After the experience of 2001-2006, no Republican will ever again have the right to complain about insufficient bipartisanship.

Questions on health care

2009-11-07T08:14:00.001-08:00

The Pelosi-favored health care bill will come to a vote in the House very soon. Conciliation with whatever the Senate passes will come later. Right now, I have more questions than observations. My main questions are these:

1. Should we oppose this legislation vigorously, or can we try to reconcile ourselves to the argument that the few good aspects of this bill (specifically, the new rules on pre-existing conditions) outweigh the many bad points (a weak or non-existent public option, mandates, fines, no savings)?

2. Suppose a bill passes, and suppose there are major problems. Will the country say "Well, we tried socialized medicine and it failed"? I fear that the citizenry will say just that, even though the House bill does not come close to any reasonable definition of socialized medicine.

3. An allied question: Has the moment for reform passed? As mentioned in previous posts, I can sense the national mood shifting back its default mode: "Laissez faire cures all evils."

4. If the moment has passed -- and if the Pelosi/Obama bill dies the ignominious death that many claim it deserves -- what then? It's easy enough for lefties to say "Back to the drawing board. Next time, let's go for single payer." But how do you know that there will be a next time? If single payer was politically difficult or impossible in 2009, when the country was in a rare liberal mood, then how will it be possible in 2010 or 2011?

How will it be possible after Congress changes hands, as it likely will?

The teabaggers are growing louder by the hour. I recall how ugly the anti-Clinton rhetoric became in 1994 and 1995. The anti-Obama rhetoric will soon become (already is?) uglier still. I foresee more militias, more calls for secession, more weird conspiracy theories, more talk of a military coup, more craziness. Now imagine the effects of a new terror attack. Or a Starr-like grand jury investigation on one pretext or other.

This country could soon be in a mood to goosestep. Again I ask: If single payer was impossible in 2009, how will it be possible in 2010 or 2011?

My suspicion: Obama had but one shot at this thing, and he blew it.

When will hell no longer be in session?

2009-11-06T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Fort Hood massacre has spurred much ugly commentary. Indeed, the bigotry on display reminds us why anti-Obama liberals cannot join forces with the tea baggers.

The wisest and most troubling observations I've seen were published in Truthout:

The soldier says that the mood on the base is “very grim,” and that even before this incident, troop morale has been very low.

“I’d say it’s at an all-time low - mostly because of Afghanistan now,” he explained. “Nobody knows why we are at either place, and I believe the troops need to know why they are there, or we should pull out, and this is a unanimous feeling, even for folks who are pro-war.”

The shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades does not come as a surprise when we consider that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than “43,000 service members -- two-thirds of them in the Army or Army Reserve -- were classified as nondeployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed” to Iraq.

Mark Thompson also has reported in Time magazine, “Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of US troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

It will be argued that Hasan could not be suffering from PTSD because he was not under stress at the time of the shooting. But in his professional capacity, he often had to deal with trauma survivors -- and it is not uncommon for those working with psychiatric patients to begin to show some of the same symptoms.

Beyond that, I do not think it unreasonable to consider the stresses placed on a Muslim facing deployment to a Muslim country where Americans are not wanted. (Nothing in the previous sentence should be considered exculpatory, of course.)

For an excellent background briefing on Afghnistan -- the secret history of how it happened, and what we should do now -- I strongly recommend a series of interviews with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story. Fitzgerald and Gould are fascinating speakers with a wealth of truly new information and insights. The interviews are here (#685, #683, and #680).

Why aren't we out?

2009-11-05T17:54:00.000-08:00

As you probably know, Major Nidal Malik Hasan -- an Army shrink at Fort Hood -- "allegedly" went berserk and shot at his fellow soldiers, killing thirteen and wounding 30. He had just discovered that he was about to be deployed overseas.

Can you believe that this is going on nearly 9 1/2 months after Obama's inauguration? Why aren't we out?