Category: The Opinionsphere

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Health care Humor Politics The Opinionsphere

Prominent Liberal Blogger: Obama acting exactly as if he does have a secret “death committee”!!!

[digg-reddit-me]In the ultimate Yglesias Award Nominee: Prominent liberal blogger Matt Yglesias (many of whose posts are ghost-written by the AntiChrist, George Soros himself) admitted ((There’s no need to follow the link. Just trust that I’m providing adequate context.)) yesterday that, analyzing what Obama has been saying about health insurance reform, it’s clear:

[T]hat’s exactly what Obama would say if he did have a secret “death committee” plan. [emphases in original]

Finally, a liberal with the inside scoop admits it. The T-4 program has commenced!!>!>!> George Soros will be supervising who lives and dies! The secret Muslims have taken over the White House and the Holocaust of the born-again is upon us.

It’s time to panic everyone!!

But be sure to make your way to your local Congressperson’s or Senator’s office first. That’s the only way to stop this Nazi-Communist-Muslim-Godless-Chicago-style-Kenyan-America-hater! He’s out to kill your children and your grandparents for being burdens on society – and he just fucking hates babies! He actually considers every live birth to be a missed opportunity for abortion!

This bill also will hurt small businesses profit margins, perhaps causing some to close!

Another godless liberal blogger has admiringly pointed out that even with admidst these Hitler-style antics by Hitlerbama, our Great Leader, Sarah Palin is urging restraint, as he summarizes her message(s):

Indeed. Obama’s evil death panels would kill my baby Trig, but let’s be sure to keep the discourse civil.

What a selfless woman! She is sooooo right! But it’s important to make sure to make your “civil” disagreement with Obama’s plan to run a Holocaust on American soil in front of your local representative. Panic – but do so in strategically-wise places.

[Legal disclaimer: Civil discourse is essential to our society, blah, blah, blah. This post is in no way intended to promote violence or otherwise mislead or induce panic despite the clear meaning of the text contained herein. The following is not supposed to be used as a list of suggestions for the most effective and media-savvy means of opposing health care reform: I’m not saying people should bring guns when they go to “discuss” health care with their Congresspeople – but all patriotic Americans stand behind the right to bear arms strongly. I’m not saying people should make death threats to supporters of the bill, though all patriotic Americans know the freedom of conservative speech is under attack!!>! I’m not saying we should hang supporters of the bill in effigy, but all patriotic Americans know group activities can build group spirit. I stand behind Sarah Palin when she chastized reporters, saying “Goshdarnityall, troops are dying for your freedom. So stop making things up!>!?!” Which is why I’m encouraging all of y’all not to lie about health care reform – but instead to express the “truth” about the government-sponsored euthanasia and abortion and gang rapes (see sections 34.1, 23.2, and 104.4 of the bill for reference) that the bill the Democrats are pushing will mandate.]

[Image by Floyd Brown licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Right-Wing Editorial FAIL!

[digg-reddit-me]The rabidly right-wing yet still influential Investors Business Daily opines against health care reform saying:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Of course, Stephen Hawking is and always has been British – having lived and worked and been taken care of by this system.

All this is to say nothing of the various other canards raised – namely that any of the current plans being debated bear any resemblance to the British single-payer and entirely government-run system.

The editorial also explains:

The British have succeeded in putting a price tag on human life, as we are about to.

Matt Yglesias nicely parries this point:

[A]s with all anti-rationing talk you really have to wonder what rightwingers think happens in a free market system. In a pure market, your life is worth what you’re able to pay. The way the free market works, if an indigent woman gives birth to a premature infant you let the infant die. Thankfully, no country—not even the US of A—is actually sufficiently committed to free market principles to let infants die like that.

Continue reading “Right-Wing Editorial FAIL!”
Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Mild-Mannered Columnist Steven Pearlstein Gets Mad

Steven Pearlstein – normally a mild-mannered columnist – has had enough. Though I can’t endorse his description of opponents of health care reform as “political terrorists,” his overriding point is correct:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage…There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress – I’ve made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

His piece is probably the best counter to much of the Republican and right-wing spin out there. He chooses here not to defend health care reform against authentic conservatives or against fiscally conservative objections – but only against those extreme views that are taking hold in the imaginations of those inclinded to be opposed to Barack Obama’s success. He explains  the moderation inherent in the plan – seeing the Health Insurance Exchange as the key – rather than the single-payer option which is still being debated. He concludes with the plaintive plea I have seen a number of Democrats make recently:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society – whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

In the past week, the health care reform opponents have grown more strident. Comparisons of Obama to Hitler have become mainstream – made by everyone from Sarah Palin to Senator Jim DeMint to Rush Limbaugh.

As this debate has devolved, the question asked of Americans has become whether you stand with those who believe our system needs to be reformed in a moderate and responsible way or with those who believes Obama is offering nothing but a Nazi-like Final Solution as Americans for Prosperity explains:

Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders – he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.

There should be a broad middle ground – where Republicans on the right and progressives on the left criticize and attempt to shape Obama’s health care reforms. But the rapid descent into extremism and blatant lies by the Republicans as they attempt to stop Obama for their own political gain has eliminated this sphere of rational commentary.

[Photo by Madi Lussier, used with permission of the creator.]

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Gog et Magog, Hypomania in the White House, Reuters!, The Most Interesting Man in the World, and the NRLC

1. Gog and Magog. James A. Haught breaks some news – at least in American papers – explaining one line of “reasoning” George W. Bush attempted to use to convince Jacques Chirac to support the invasion of Iraq:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East… The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled… This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

Chirac was so confused by this reasoning that he actually called in a Swiss theologian to explain. Just last week, Chirac confirmed this in an extended interview in France.

2. Hypomania in the White House. John Gartner for Psychology Today profiles Rahm Emanuel and the Emanuel family that shaped him. He describes Emanuel as hypomanic – which he stresses is not a psychological disorder, but a condition. Some of the more interesting tidbits:

Emanuel says f*ck more frequently than “if, and, or but,” insists political scientist Larry Sabato. Obama himself regularly jokes about Emanuel’s profanity: “For Rahm, every day is a swearing-in ceremony.”

Gartner also discusses how Emanuel’s family shaped him:

Stuck with each other, the brothers created their own subculture—unlike most gifted high-energy kids, who must deal with the confusing feelings that come with being different. Like the X-Men at the Mutant Academy, the brothers felt most normal in one another’s presence, where they could be themselves—with a vengeance.

The brotherhood may have been instrumental in curbing another hallmark of hypomania. If you’re hypomanic and gifted, you always have the feeling of being the smartest guy in the room. But if you have two other guys just as smart and aggressive in the room who say, “That’s a stupid idea” and start to pound you, it’ll knock some of the grandiosity out of you.

And this:

While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there “gladiatorial,” Zeke described it to me as more of a Talmudic debate—the Jewish tradition of argument where one’s opponent is viewed as an ally in the search for truth. “It’s a sign of love to take someone’s view seriously,” says Zeke, who has fostered at NIH a style modeled directly on the Emanuel dinner table; he calls it “combative collegiality.”

3. Reuters! Reuters believes in a link economy. Suck on that AP.

4. The Most Interesting Man in the World. I was going to link to an article at AdAge by Jeremy Mullman on Dos Equis’s spectacularly successfuly “Most Interesting Man” campaign – but as the article went viral, AdAge has apparently attempted to limit its distribution and now placed it behind a firewall. Google does have a cached version here. For now. It’s an interesting story of how the ad campaign broke all of the rules of beer advertising – and led Dos Equis to buck the trend of declining imported beer sales and actually notch a double digit rise.

5. The NLRC: Not about abortion any more. William Saletan explains why certain pro-life Democrats are having their loyalty questioned by the National Right to Life Committee despite their unchanged anti-abortion stance:

In 2007, Ryan began to flunk the scorecard because the scorecard was no longer primarily about abortion. It wasn’t Ryan who changed. It was NRLC.

[Image by me.]

Categories
Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Stop Whining, Congressman Issa

[digg-reddit-me]Congressional Republicans got their knickers in a bunch this week sending off a quite nasty letter in response to what they allege (citing the Politico) to be hardball political tactics of Rahm Emanuel pushing back against Senator Jon Kyl.

This all supposedly started when Senator Kyl on This Week With George Stephanopoulos took on the stimulus bill:

KYL: Yes. And with respect to the stimulus, I think it’s now acknowledged, it hasn’t done what it set out to do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But your government says it has in Arizona.

KYL: No. What our – look, all governors like “free money” coming to the state. My governor is no different. But the reality is that it has added to our deficit. We’re now going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit this year.

It seems more plausible that these rather mild remarks aren’t what started this, but the general push by Senator Kyl to cancel the stimulus bill that included an op-ed published a week before this in which he explained:

With the results now in, it’s not a surprise that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 45 percent of Americans want to cancel the rest of the stimulus spending.  I agree.

In response to Kyl’s attempts to cancel the stimulus bill, Rahm Emanuel – according to Politico – had several department heads responsible for distributing stimulus funds write to the Republican Arizona governor, who is on the record as supporting the bill and saying it is working for her state, asking her if she agreed with Senator Kyl and wished to cancel any future funding from the stimulus. In some variation or another, the letters made this point:

On Sunday, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway. I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know…

Darrell Issa, a California Republican Congressman, accepted Politico’s characterization that it was an “assault” on Kyl, as well as a “fist to the nose,”  and a message to “Back off.” In a letter to Emanuel (pdf), Issa asked:

At what point do you believe your practice of Chicago-style politics violates a public official’s right to speak out in favor of alternative policies?

All of this seems fair and good to me – it’s politics. If Issa thinks he’ll win points whining, then all the power to him. If Emanuel thinks he can get the Republican governor of Arizona and potential presidential candidate and Senator from Arizona Jon Kyl squabbling, then all the power to him.

But on style points, Issa loses. His letter which implies that Emanual is violating the right of public officials to speak out in favor of alternative policies. This is the same Issa who sided with Dick Cheney’s office after they outed an undercover CIA agent because her husband spoke out against the Iraq war; and the same Issa who obstructed debate on the reauthorization of FISA until a fellow Congressman withdrew his comments that the Bush administration had broken the law. Over his career then, not much attention given to the right of public officials to speak their minds – unless they agree with him. Blatant hypocrisy while whining about objective standards always loses you style points.

I have a question for Congressman Issa (congressman.issa@mail.house.gov): At what point does your arugula-sniffing, California-style oversensitive, politics of umbrage idiocy get old?

You’re in Congress. Grow up. If you’re in Washington trying to play hardball, don’t whine when someone on your team takes a hit.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Iraq National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Censoring the Truth About the Crusader Prince?

[digg-reddit-me]Scott Horton apparently reported on several declarations filed in Federal Court in Eastern Virginia that included explosive allegations regarding the military contractor Blackwater and its owner Erik Prince. Andrew Sullivan linked to him – but between Sullivan’s linking and my clicking on Sullivan’s link, the article was taken down. A search of The Daily Beast for Scott Horton’s article turns up nothing except a link to Jeremy Scahill of The Nation‘s recent piece on the same subject. Andrew Sullivan had excerpted this summary of the charges contained in the Declarations on his blog:

  • Both men requested anonymity to avoid mortal threats. “It appears that Mr. Prince or his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities,” said John Doe #1. John Doe #2 says he received personal threats after leaving Blackwater.
  • Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” He “intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis.”
  • Blackwater “employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms of Iraqis and other Arabs, such as ‘ragheads’ or ‘hajis.’”
  • Blackwater deployed to Iraq individuals who (a) made “statements about wanting to… ‘kill ragheads’ or achieve ‘kills’ or ‘body counts,’” (b) drank excessively, (c) used steroids, and (d) failed to follow safety and other instructions governing the use of lethal weapons. Mental-health professionals who raised concerns about deployment of such individuals were fired.
  • Prince obtained “illegal ammunition… designed to explode after penetrating within the human body” and smuggled it into Iraq for use.
  • Prince distributed other illegal weapons for use in Iraq.
  • Prince was aware of the use of prostitutes, “including child prostitutes,” at Blackwater’s “Man Camp” in Iraq, which he visited.

The actual declarations can be found here – John Doe 1 (pdf) – and here – John Doe 2 (pdf). These papers were part of opposition to a motion – the complete set of which can be found here. (Beware – it’s a few hundred pages of pdfs). I have emailed Scott Horton to see if he has any comment/explanation for why his article is no longer up on the Daily Beast.

Edit: The Daily Beast still has not gotten back to me. Mr. Horton replied telling me that he was looking into why his article was taken down himself.

[Image by John Rohan licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Foreign Policy The Clintons The Opinionsphere

Did Kim Jong Il Apologize for Calling Hillary A “Funny Lady”?

David Rothkopf asks an interesting question:

I wonder how our former president and Kim Jong Il handled the “funny lady” who looks like a “pensioner going shopping” comments at dinner tonight?  And however they handled it, if only we could have gotten a glimpse of the “Annie Hall” subtitles that would have revealed what they were really thinking.”

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Lies About Health Care Reform

[digg-reddit-me]The August War for Health Care Reform has begun. The forces for health care reform and those against it (working with those who are against it right now) have both begun to wage the battle for public opinion and to influence Congress. Many on the pro-reform side are not sure if they are happy with the plans being considered – and are frustrated with what they see as the lack of forthrightness in selling the plan. There are currently multiple versions of the legislation in Congress – and the president has yet to state what he will require to be in the bill. This all seems part of a strategy, but it makes organizing more difficult. In the end, there is little choice but to trust that if given the proper space and pressure politically, Obama and the Democratic Congress will do the right thing.

But while this may be frustrating what has become very clear is that the opponents of reform are willing to lie outrageously in order to turn the tide in this fight. And those people who favor reform must beat back these complaints vigorously. Here’s a roundup of recent lies told by the opponents of reform:

1. Last week in an opening volley, I received a charming email from Townhall.com stating that “ObamaCare=Gov’t Funded Abortion and Euthanasia.” This is clearly not true.

2. Then, this morning, I opened up the Drudge Report and found as his main link a heavily edited video claiming that it showed Obama “IN HIS OWN WORDS” saying his health care plan will eliminate private insurance. Even in its heavily edited version, it didn’t show this. Instead it showed Obama endorsing the generally accepted idea that we should gradually end our employer-based health insurance. Obama’s views on single-payer health insurance have been gone over repeatedly. His campaign website gave three examples of him using the same formulation – which incidentally he also used in at least one debate that I recall:

If you’re starting from scratch, then a single-payer system’-a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment-‘would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.

So, what we have is a obviously edited video of Obama at various times in the past ten years saying that he supports a single-payer system (cutting out the second half of the statement) and his admission that he believes we should move away from employer-based health insurance. The video though is being promoted as proving that Obama is admitting that his plan would secretly impose government insurance on everyone. The video very clearly shows no such thing.

Yet, even so, the Libertarian sub-reddit was fooled and promoted the video.

The White House has helpfully provided the videos with some context in what I think is an excellent effort to combat this smear.

3. The hysteria over Obama’s health care reform even bled over into my walk home through Midtown Manhattan. On the way, I passed a booth run by the LaRouche PAC with a picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache (similar to this one) and an older black woman explaining to passers-by that Obama was seeking to kill older Americans just like Hitler did. Everyone knows the LaRouchites are a bit crazy. But how different is this from what Rush Limbaugh says? Or Fox News? I took a flyer from the women – though not before telling the person she was preaching to that Obama really wasn’t actually trying to kill her. The flyer explained (the PDF linked is slightly different version from what I received):

U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a nationally-televised press conference at 8 p.m. on July 22nd, in which on five separate occasions he called for health reform legislation featuring the establishment of “an independent board of doctors and health care experts” to make the life-and-death decisions of what care to provide, and what not, based on cost-effectiveness criteria – exactly the infamous “T-4” policy imposed by Adolf Hitler in 1939, for which the Nazi regime was tried and condemned at Nuremberg.

Lyndon LaRouche commented, within minutes of Obama’s remarks:

“President Obama is now impeachable, because he has, in effect, proposed legislation which is an exact copy of the legislation for which the Hitler regime was condemned in the post-war trials. This is an impeachable offense: to propose such a thing in this time, is an impeachable offense. The time has come that the President of the United States deserves impeachment. With this statement from him, the President now deserves impeachment.”

On how many levels is this ridiculous? The independent board of doctors and health care experts would replace MedPAC – a board that currently provides guidance to Congress in setting Medicare rates. Instead of advising, Obama’s new board – the IMAC – would make recommendations as to levels of pay that would be sent to the president and, if then endorsed by him, would be subject to the approval of Congress. They would also do studies of the comparative effectiveness of different types of treatments. Does this sound like a euthanasia program to you?

4. There is also an email is circulating that makes all sorts of outrageous claims about the bills under consideration on health care reform – including many of the above claims – and pretends to cite the pages and lines of the bill that mandate what it describes. Like many of these viral email lists of lies, it relies on the laziness and gullibility of the American people – trusting that people will pass it on rather than check the truthfulness of the claims themselves. The email was pretty thoroughly debunked by Linda Bergthold, a health care policy consultant and researcher who has been working in the field for 25 years, and Politifact, an arm of the St. Petersburg Times that analyzes the truth of political statements.

A lot of this stuff is hard to believe – but as Bill Maher pointed out last week – if you let even stupidest arguments stand unchallenged, they will take root and destroy even one’s best efforts. Which is why I’m going to try to make a point of calling bullshit on these outrageous lies as they come by…and you should too…

[Image by criswell; used without permission, but hopefully he’ll respond and give it to me soon.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama and the Technocrats

[digg-reddit-me]Last week I wrote about Obama’s focus on using technocratic institutions to tackle the nation’s most intractable problems. I attributed to Obama a particular attitude towards our current media-political system – one consistent with many reformists – and then explained how Obama was seeking to push the change he had campaigned on, the difficult choices, onto these technocratic institutions, thus solving his political and policy problems at once. But by outsourcing significant authority to these bureaucratic and independent (and thus not quite accountable) organizations – from IMAC to the Federal Reserve to the National Infrastructure Bank – Obama was bleeding authority from elected institutions. At the same time, I tend to agree with the reformist critiques that recount the massive failures of our current media-political system to tackle most (if not all) long-term structural problems.

But since I’ve written this, I have come across a number of pieces challenging this idea from various perspectives on the left.

Mark Schmitt, an editor for the progressive The American Prospect, saw Obama’s approach as the opposite of what I did – though he focused on national security and justice issues. Schmitt agrees with the reformist attitude I attribute to Obama, writing:

[T]he idea that America’s “existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability” flies in the face of all observed reality. For at least eight years, those institutions consistently failed to deliver accountability, and the Department of Justice and courts likewise failed to punish some of the greatest abuses of power in our history.

But he is himself frustrated that Obama does not share it. He concludes:

It takes some discipline to understand that organizational culture, not organizational structure, determines success or failure. And it takes a lot of patience to wait for an organizational culture to turn around and resist the temptation to add a commission here, a new agency there. Obama’s organizational discipline was the hallmark of his campaign, and we can only hope that his unyielding insistence that “our existing democratic institutions are strong enough” will eventually make them so.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing in The New Republic strongly disputes any attempts to link Obama’s technocrats with Kennedy’s technocrats (as I did) – writing that the Kennedy men weren’t brought down by their knowledge and rationality, but instead:

Their error was an excess of ideology; they were not empirical enough.

He concludes that the brilliant men of the Kennedy administration are different from the brilliant individuals of Obama’s:

Kennedy chose as his defense secretary the president of a car company. Obama chose the sitting secretary of defense. Obama’s brainiacs–people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag–come from a different meritocracy than Kennedy’s did. They are not brilliant generalists. For better or for worse, they are experts.

It is clear that Obama’s technocrats are of a different sort than Kennedy’s – and I made that point as well. It also seems that many of them are students of history and have attempted to learn the lessons of their predecessors – from John Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s “best and brightest” to Clinton’s New Democrats. But I’m eager to see some commentary dealing with the fact that Obama has found an elegant solution to many of these intractable and politically fraught problems – from global warming to health care to financial regulation to infrastructure spending – an independent, technocratic institution that removes political considerations from these decisions and thus receives relatively broad bipartisan support. (I believe the independent agency proposed to tackle each of these problems has some bipartisan history.) And then to tease out what the potential implications and pitfalls of this are.

Because while Schmitt and Wallace-Wells make good points in disagreement with my thesis – their supporting facts do not undermine my point, just their broader generalizations from these facts.  Clearly – Obama respects existing institutions more than I gave him credit for – especially in the areas of national security and justice (and even financial regulation you could argue.) But it’s also clear that Obama’s solutions to many difficult domestic policy questions are to outsource the hardest decisions to incrementalist, technocratic, independent institutions.

[This image is not subject to copyright.]

Categories
The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

The Superiority of Bloggers

Stephen Walt makes an excellent point:

I can’t figure out why newspapers aren’t hiring more bloggers to write columns for them on a regular basis. I started reading blogs because the stuff I read on the web tends to be smarter, funnier, better researched, and more entertainingly written than the pablum that appears on the op-ed pages of most newspapers. A lot of bloggers seem to produce more material too; frankly, doing a column twice a week sounds almost leisurely compared to what some bloggers pound out. There are dull bloggers and some excellent mainstream print pundits, of course, but I’m amazed that more bloggers aren’t breaking into the so-called big-time mainstream media. Probably another good reason why newspapers are dying. [my emphasis]

Imagine how great this blog would be with an editor to give some guidance and – you know – edit – instead of me editing drafts during my morning commute.