brainiac conspiracy

Snark of The Day: Arnie Goes to Kabul

If only. It's been a while since we've had a worthy quote, and this one is gonna be hard to beat for quite some time:

Here Obama has 68,000 troops over there [in Afghanistan] and the Generals are asking for another 20,000 -- maybe 30,000 more troops -- saying it's not enough. The military and the hawks will always say "not enough." Obama has to say "enough" -- or he's going to be drawn into it.

Now they've shifted the mission of troops: to protect the villages of Afghanistan. 100,000 Americans can't protect the villages of Afghanistan -- and now they say we're going to be there to build a nation; we're not good at building other nations -- we're hardly good at building our nation. If you're an Afghani and look up and see Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legislature in Sacramento coming to build your nation, you're going to run -- you're going to put up a No Trespassing sign.

(H/t Greenwald.)

---Vitelius

The Awesomeness of Mafioso Government

Hard to know exactly how else to characterize this column today:

If President Obama has been frustrated in his desire not to look back at Bush-era detention practices, it is because he is caught between two fundamental but seemingly irreconcilable American principles.

On the one hand, this is a nation of laws. If torture violates U.S. law -- and it does -- and if Americans engaged in torture -- and they did -- that cannot be ignored, forgotten, swept away. When other nations violate human rights, the United States objects and insists on some accounting. It can't ask less of itself.

Yet this is also a nation where two political parties compete civilly and alternate power peacefully. Regimes do not seek vengeance, through the courts or otherwise, as they succeed each other. Were Obama to criminally investigate his predecessor for what George W. Bush believed to be decisions made in the national interest, it could trigger a debilitating, unending cycle.

Fred Hiatt should have stopped his column with "Torture violates US law"---period---because that is as far as the argument need proceed. Any further attempt to deflect scrutiny from the people who formulated and authorized the torture policy is to make the claim that executive lawbreaking is by definition justified, to Hiatt's mind, so long as the executive "believes" his authorization of illegal activity serves some ill-defined "national interest."

It is a laughable argument on its face. Whether or not Bush or Cheney "believed" their decisions were in the national interest is of no greater legal importance than whether or not Richard Nixon believed he was acting in the "national interest" when he authorized the payment of laundered money to a bunch of hired gunsels known as the White House Plumbers who had been caught committing felonious acts, or whether or not Ronald Reagan believed that running guns to the Iranians in return for money to fund an overseas proxy army in violation of federal law was in the "national interest". As we all most of us learned from our undergrad business-law professors, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And the law was perfectly clear on the issue of waterboarding at the time the worst excesses took place. Didn't Fred Hiatt even bother to read the CIA 2004 Inspector General's report that was released by the Justice Department only ten days ago?

And what is this "endless, debilitating cycle" Fred Hiatt writes of? Perhaps he means that an honest investigation of Bush-era criminality would run he risk offending those who supported and/or enabled torture, and who continue to defend it to this day, i.e., Congressional Republicans; who, one supposes, would then see this as justification to launch "endless, debilitating" investigations of Obama-era lawlessness. As if Congressional Republicans had shown no proclivity to ever---ever--launch endless and debilitating investigations of a past Democratic administration for no reason whatsoever.

The appointment of a Truth Commission that Hiatt writes about is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. Simply giving executives such as Bush and Cheney a pass on accountability for any lawbeaking that they ordered, sanctioned or condoned for the absurd reason that their hearts were in the right place on counterterrorism policy is to reduce our system of laws, of assessing innocence or guilt based on concrete evidence and due deliberation, to a movable feast of moral relativism that very much resembles what she said:

I guess the reason it was wrong to crucify Jesus was because the Romans had bad intentions, otherwise it would have been perfectly justified. It certainly explains why the Inquisition was fine and dandy. You learn something new every day.

---Vitelius

Coming Soon to a Multiplex Near You

I have a suspicion that this is not going to end well.

The Supreme Court will cut short its summer break in early September to hear a new argument in a momentous case that could transform the way political campaigns are conducted.

The case, which arises from a minor political documentary called Hillary: The Movie, seemed an oddity when it was first argued in March. Just six months later, it has turned into a juggernaut with the potential to shatter a century-long understanding about the government's ability to bar corporations from spending money to support political candidates.

You mean there are actually activist judges on the Supreme Court? Hmmmm, I wonder who they could be.

Though three Justices (Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) have voted repeatedly for Austin to be overruled, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito thus far have moved more cautiously. In each of the campaign-finance cases decided by the Roberts court, these justices have sided with those challenging the law, but in an incremental way. If Roberts or Alito were ready to go the narrow route again in Citizens United, however, there would have been no reason to set the case for reargument explicitly asking the parties to brief the constitutional question, and certainly no reason to rush the case to September so it can be decided before the 2010 election season goes into full swing.

And there's a tantalizing hint of where the court will go in another obscure campaign-finance case decided last year, FEC v. Davis. That case involved a different provision of McCain-Feingold, one involving raising contribution limits for candidates facing wealthy opponents. Justice Alito used the case to attack the underlying reasoning of Austin, which upheld the spending limits on grounds that corporate wealth "distorts" the political process and allows spending by corporations "disproportionate" to the views of those in society. In Davis, Justice Alito, for the five conservatives on the court, attacked this equality rationale and said it is "dangerous business" for Congress to try to influence voter choices through "leveling" electoral opportunities. He pointedly cited with approval Justice Kennedy's Austin dissent.

If Roberts and Justice Alito were ready to overrule Austin, why not do it now? I can think of two possible reasons. They may not have wanted to take the plunge on Justice Souter's last day on the court. He has been an ardent defender of these laws. Perhaps more to the point, Justice Alito, in two campaign-finance cases, has said that he would not consider revisiting old campaign-finance precedent until the issue was squarely before the court and briefed. In other words, Alito wants a full airing of the issues before taking such a momentous step.

Now he will get that.

For those of you in need of a little memory jog, the driving force behind Citizens United is a poster child for the abuse of 1st Amendment rights:

• During the 1992 presidential campaign, [David] Bossie got into a fistfight with a Little Rock, Ark., private investigator, Larry Case, who said he had damaging information on Clinton. Bossie told police that Case had punched him after Bossie refused to pay Case a $10,000 advance as they were preparing to board a flight at Little Rock National Airport.

• That same year, Bossie set out to prove that a young pregnant woman named Susan Coleman had committed suicide in 1977 after having an affair with Clinton. Coleman's mother told CBS that Bossie hounded her relentlessly with his false story, even following her to an Army hospital in Georgia, where she was visiting her husband, in recovery from a stroke. Bossie and another man "burst into the sick man's room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide," CBS reported.

• Also in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, repudiating Bossie's tactics, filed an FEC complaint against Bossie's group after it produced a TV ad inviting voters to call a hot line to hear (almost certainly doctored) tape-recorded conversations between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.

• In 1994, Bossie traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., with an NBC producer, where the two allegedly "stalked" and "ambushed" Beverly Bassett Schaffer, a former state regulatory officer and a lawyer who had played a small role in the so-called Whitewater conspiracy. The two confronted Schaffer outside her office and, after she refused an on-camera interview, reportedly chased her across town, until she found refuge in the lobby of an office building.

• In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had "dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater." Another mailing reported that Bossie was "on the inside directing the probe." Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D'Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.

• In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie's deceptive presence to "Ollie North running around the House."

• In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman [Dan] Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of "unrelenting" self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible "to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney's Office." (Bossie's habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)

• The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw the release of the doctored [Webster] Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the time, "At Bossie's request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth] Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell's prison conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was indicted." According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close working relations with Starr investigators.

• The tapes were edited for "privacy" considerations, according to Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.

• Yet, in 1999, Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his "outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement." And it wasn't just the conservative base that continued to embrace Bossie after the Hubbell tape disgrace; so did many in the Washington press corps.

There are a lot of civilized nations in this world where a fella like this would have a lengthy rap sheet and a prison record. Only in the Land of The Free™, however, is a psychotic like this granted an appointment at the Supreme Court to argue---successfully, one imagines---for the legal enshrinement of Swiftboating as an inviolable exercise of free-speech rights. So much for Libel laws and labeling requirements.

Now, I don't want to sound too flippant here since there are, after all, some legitimate Constitutional issues, at least on the periphery, that are raised by this case. But let's not fool ourselves: people like David Bossie don't give a rat's ass about the the Constitution or the rule of law in general---their only concern is attaining power using any means at their disposal. People like this have no use for institutions like the Supreme Court other than as vehicles to pursue their own ideological agenda. And they have proven more than once that they will literally resort to any kind of conduct, legal or otherwise---up to and including stalking, blackmail, and outright assault---to achieve their political ends. The Court would be well advised to carefully consider the kinds of behavior to which it would granting, however indirectly, its official imprimatur as the final arbiter of lawful conduct in America. I have no illusion that people like Scalia and Thomas and Sam Alito actually give a shit about ancillary issues like that, but it would be nice to think that one of them would one day.

Read Eric Boehlert's piece in its entirety. If there is ever a total right-wing putsch in this country---and I am starting to fear that it will come sooner rather than later---we will have a lot of people to thank for it, in our government and in our establishment media. For now, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi would be well advised to reconsider their previous stated refusal to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine as soon as possible. The appearance of The Kenyan Candidate at multiplexes everywhere in 2012 should be taken for granted at this point.

And thank you, Blue Dog Senators Akaka, Baucus, Bingaman, Byrd, Carper, Conrad, Dorgan, Inuoye, Kohl, Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson, Nelson, Pryor, Rockefeller and Salazar for doing your part to ensure that the highest court in the land will be a welcome port for every right-wing character assassin with an ideological axe to grind for the next quarter century. We couldn't have done it without you.

---Vitelius

The Unbearable Awesomeness of Bankruptcy

Today's Kristof column on healthcare in the Times today is just heartbreaking, though the outrage it should provoke among all of us still manages to make its presence felt near the end of it:

The existing system doesn't just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That's one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it's a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of "death panels" could---even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes---all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Of course, the hard part of this equation is getting the various members of the Teabag Brigade and the willing GOP executioners to think it through, and I have no idea how to crack that particular nut. This is a good reminder, though, for those of us who bitch and moan on a regular business about the tendency of Our Liberal Media® to meekly serve as ardent defenders of the corporate status quo that there are indeed some thoughtful and perceptive writers toiling away in their service---and on humanitarian issues. Nick Kristof is arguably the best in the dead-tree business now.

---Vitelius

But I Got a $15 Blackberry! How Cool is That?

Nobody could have predicted that throwing a lot of money at a bunch of insolvent financial institutions would produce a result that was anything less than than Total Economic Awesomeness:

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

"It is at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed," said Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "It fed the crisis, and it has gotten worse because of the crisis."

Regulators' concerns are twofold: that consumers will wind up with fewer choices for services and that big banks will assume they always have the government's backing if things go wrong. That presumed guarantee means large companies could return to the risky behavior that led to the crisis if they figure federal officials will clean up their mess.

Fortunately for us, we've got watchdogs with real teeth now, not like those industry patsies that cluttered the bureaucracy during the Bush administration. Unless, of course, they were:

What do you do with someone who played a key role in the deregulatory push that ultimately led to the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout? In Washington, the answer is easy: Have him help oversee the rescue.

No wonder life in the U.S. capital can seem like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The appointment of former Securities and Exchange Commission member Paul Atkins to the Congressional Oversight Panel -- which monitors the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- goes beyond the usual inside-the-Beltway games and should make investors wary . . .

Atkins was named last week to be one of two Republicans on the five-member TARP panel headed by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. He replaces former Senator John Sununu, who stepped down in July . . .

Although Atkins was just one of five SEC commissioners from 2002 to 2008 (never the chairman) he was a driving force within the agency. This was especially true while Christopher Cox was chairman from August 2005 to January 2009.

Atkins was also seen as the sharp tip of the deregulatory spear during George W. Bush's presidency.

Atkins didn't waver from his hands-off position, even as the credit crunch intensified. Speaking less than two months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Atkins in one of his last speeches at the SEC warned against calls for a "new regulatory order."

He added, "We must not immediately jump to the conclusion that failures of firms in the marketplace or the unavailability of credit in the marketplace is caused by market failure, or indeed regulatory failure."

When I spoke with him yesterday, Atkins hadn't changed his tune. "If the takeaway by some people is that deregulation is the thing that led to problems in the marketplace, that's completely wrong," he said. "The problems happened in the most heavily regulated areas of the financial-services industry."

And this is from Bloomsberg, not the Economist or some other Euro Commie rag.

Meanwhile, out here in California, where national trends are set years in advance, we're dealing with the current crisis like all great patriots do: we're going shopping!

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is hoping that the "Great California Garage Sale" will turn government clutter like surplus prison uniforms and office furniture into cash to bulk up the state's depleted finances.

On offer as the state clears out clutter are nearly 600 state-owned vehicles and thousands of pieces of office furniture, computers, electronics, jewelry, pianos, even a surf board, a food saver and an Xbox 360 gaming system.

State officials estimate the giant two-day yard sale being held at a state warehouse will bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to clearing out office products, the state is also selling unclaimed property from state parks and items confiscated by law enforcement, said California Department of General Services spokesman Eric Lamoureux.

The prison department contributed dental chairs and surplus prison shirts and jeans.

"This is a win-win for the state and for shoppers," Schwarzenegger said in a statement Tuesday announcing that a selection of items also would be sold on eBay and Craigslist. "Together we are eliminating waste and providing great deals in this tough economy."

Schwarzenegger also has autographed 15 car visors in an effort to fetch more money during the sale Friday and Saturday.

California sure could use the cash: the state was force to hand out IOUs earlier this year, government workers are on the brink of revolt over a 14 percent pay cut and the state remains in an interminable state of financial morass.

Bwahahahahahahaha!!!!!

You know, sometimes I wonder if the question that's really being debated in the current showdown over healthcare-reform isn't the question of whether we'll end up with a public option or regional co-ops, or whether we'll end up with a tolerable bill or a terrible bill, but whether or not we the people will be allowed by our rulers to have something resembling liberal government in this country ever again: The kind of government that perceives the safety, health and comfort of its individual citizens as its most important task, not the security and profitability of its largest corporations or financial markets; whether the genies of greed, privatization and hyper-corporatism that were unleashed during the Reagan years can ever be contained and controlled again, or whether these values have become so all-pervasive and so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche of our political and media cultures that we are hereafter doomed to alternate in eight-year election cycles between business-friendly Democratic "moderates" who see their primary role in government as stewards and guardians of our most powerful institutions, and right-wing Republican looters and pilferers who model their style of governance after those of Somali warlords.

We haven't seen a genuinely "liberal" government in this country since Lyndon Johnson's time. Some of you older readers might remember him---but in case you don't, he was the guy who lobbied for, and won the passage of, Medicare, and Medicaid, and voting rights, and federal funding of education, and federal endowments for the humanities and arts, and welfare. Given the prevailing political culture in our country, and the obeisance of our national newsmedia in defending it, it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone of his type being permitted within 100 meters of the White House today.

---Vitelius

Couldn't Have Happened to a Better Guy

Unfortunately, it's happening to the rest of us, too:

You have to wonder if this guy ever looks in the mirror and considers the amount of damage that has been done to our public discourse---and how much lizard-brain collective insanity has been unleashed---as a result of his selecting one of the most unqualified, and unscrupulous, political figures in the history of the Republic to join him as a partner-in-arms in the White House last fall.

And speaking of which, here's something else that nobody could possibly have predicted:

Organizers of an Anchorage event that has been billing Sarah Palin for weeks as a star speaker were left scrambling Wednesday after learning that the former governor won't be there for tonight's event and claims to have never been asked.

It would be at least the fourth time in recent months that an anticipated Palin speech has fallen through after Palin and her camp disputed they had ever confirmed it. That includes the brouhaha over whether she'd speak at the annual congressional Republican fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., this summer.

This time it's an event promoting an Alaska ballot measure aimed at making it illegal for teens to get an abortion without telling their parents. The Alaska Family Council has been advertising that Palin would give a speech and become the first official signer of the ballot petition tonight at ChangePoint, the Anchorage megachurch.

Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said Wednesday, in response to inquiries from the Daily News about tonight's event, that "this is the first we have ever heard of a speech." She said Palin is out of state and won't be there.

Stapleton declined to provide details on where Palin is and what she is doing.

Why not? Why the secrecy?And by the way, have we ever actually seen the Moose Whisperer's birth certificate?

Alaska Family Council President Jim Minnery said it was news to him when a reporter told him that Stapleton was saying Palin had no knowledge of the speech, which his group has been promoting. He said organizers have been talking to Palin "contacts" for weeks about it.

"All we can do is take people at their word that we've worked with in the past," Minnery said. "We've been working for several weeks on the event, promoting it very heavily. It would be a grave disappointment if she doesn't show up but the show will still go on."

Here at the Baron's crib, we don't call her Bailin' Palin for nothing.

---Vitelius

Strangling Students in The Bathtub

Over at Hullabaloo today, the ever-prescient Tristero looks at American high schoolers' abysmal recent test scores in math and science, and concludes:

This is one more tragic example of what happens when our country's discourse gets hijacked by the extreme right. Instead of focusing on what is really needed to prepare kids for reality, everyone sane---be they teachers, students, parents, administrators, school boards, legislators, prominent scientists, interested laypeople---has to waste their precious time wrestling with the right's truly bonkers obsessions: fighting attempts to get lies taught in science or proving that Obama really is not trying to turn America into a socialist dystopia like his birthplace, Kenya.

Quite true. I'd only add that this also happens, at least in part, when states decide to tether their economic fortunes to resentment-fueled right-wing political campaigns to dismantle public education by (a) strangling local school districts of property-tax funding, which thereby (b) transfers an inordinate amount of control of community institutions to an increasingly cash-strapped state.

Before Prop 13, in the 1950s and '60s, California was a liberal showcase. Governors Earl Warren and Pat Brown responded to the population growth of the postwar boom with a massive program of public infrastructure---the nation's finest public college system, the freeway system and the state aqueduct that carries water from the well-watered north to the parched south. When Ronald Reagan was governor, he actually raised taxes. Then Proposition 13 shot the tires out of Pat Brown's liberal state. Liberal legislative leaders such as Willie Brown and John Burton jerry-rigged repairs and kept the damaged vehicle running for 30 years. Now Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger says there is no choice but to complete the demolition by slashing essential services.

Proposition 13 was the brainchild of the late Howard Jarvis. The antitax crusader was a policy genius not unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both shared an affinity for designing deep structural change that, once embedded in the political system, is nearly impossible to alter without a massive change of heart by voters. Social Security is the lasting legacy of the New Deal era because F.D.R. understood that workers who contribute payroll-tax deductions from their paychecks would not want politicians tinkering with their retirement dollars. Conservatives have mounted assaults on Social Security through the years but to no avail.

Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California---an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy. Beholden to a tax-averse electorate, the state's liberals and moderates have attempted to live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect---freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts that vanished after the antitax measure passed.

Here in California, we've been engaging in this low-tax experiment in social engineering for 30 years now, and the results are exactly as its proponents intended.

During the 1970s, California' school spending per student was close to, or even higher than, that of the US as a whole. Since 1981-82, California has consistently spent less per student than the US as a whole. During most of the 1990s, California lagged the nation in per student spending by more than $1,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

California's spending on schools, measured as a share of its personal income, has also lagged that of the US as a whole.

We rank 34th out of the 50 states in our spending per student 34 at $8,607 compared to the national average of $9,566.

We rank 34th out of the 50 states in the percentage of our state's income on K-12 education.

We rank 48th in the number of K-12 students per teacher at 19.1 compared to 14.7 for the nation as a whole.

These numbers are actually better than where they were 10 years ago. And yes, California voters have attempted a financing fix at the ballot box, which, while effective in part, relies almost exclusively on sales and income tax revenues to make up the shortfalls in property tax revenues---and we all know what happens to those revenue sources when a major recession hits.

This is not to discount the corrosive influence that legions of creationists and climate-change deniers have exerted on school systems throughout the country, particularly in the South and Appalachia. We Californians have simply proved that there's more than one way to kill off a once-great system of public education: if the Young Earthers can't do it, the supply-siders can. All you need is a populace that's been primed by the Right to trade away its birthright for a tax cut.

---Vitelius

Remember, It Is Never About Race

Because there are no white racists anymore---just dedicated patriots taking the high road and arguing against healthcare reform on principle alone:

While supporters dominated inside the auditorium, opponents made a splash outside the high school gymnasium with street theater.

The Moran town hall was the last stop on a 10-city tour for Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist known for his extreme tactics.

Terry's colleagues put on a skit with a man in an Obama mask pretending to whip a bloodied woman, who kept saying, "Massa, don't hit me no more. I got the money to kill the babies."

Terry himself dressed in a doctor's lab coat and pretended to stab a woman in a gray wig.

"There's no way to pay for this thing without killing granny," Terry explained.

Twenty years ago, Randall Terry was considered a dangerous extremist by a lot of religious conservatives. Even today, there are folks in the pro-life movement who cringe at the mere mention of his name. But among Republican political activists, he's just one of the 'Bag Boys nowadays. Such is the state of today's GOP.

---Vitelius

Defiling the Corpse

I don't have a whole lot to add to the passing of Ted Kennedy that plenty of other knowledgeable folks, many of whom knew him well, have already contributed today. I do notice, however, plenty of righteous indignation in the Rubber Room today over the idea that Democrats in Congress might---the horror!---invoke the name of Ted Kennedy to pass healthcare reform legislation:

But here's one tip for liberals outraged that anyone would speak ill of the dead in regard to Kennedy. Such protests are fair for the moment. But they lose all legitimacy the moment liberals try to use his memory to steam roll a health-care bill through Congress. If they want to invoke his memory or legacy as a reason to pass their partisan version of health-care reform, that is their right. But they should not then say that nobody should dare criticize Kennedy. That's not making an argument for health-care reform, that is simple bullying and I see no reason why opponents of the Democratic push should cave in to it.

That's the principled stand. We know, after all, that Republicans would never invoke the memory of one of their dead leaders to pursue a nakedly partisan political agenda. Unless, of course, they do.

And using a dead President to raise campaign funds? Why, that would be beyond the pale. Unless of course . . . you guessed it.

After three days of suspended political activity, the Bush campaign began openly incorporating Ronald Reagan's death into its reelection message yesterday, revamping its website to give Reagan a dominant role and distributing official campaign letters that invoke the former president.

Since Reagan's death Saturday, Bush has repeatedly offered glowing praise of the 40th president in ways that echo his own reelection efforts, but were not overtly political.

Yesterday, his campaign took the refrain into the political realm. Bush officials sent an e-mail inviting supporters to add to a "living memorial" on the campaign website -- one click away from the page that solicits campaign donations and recruits volunteers. Visitors to the official campaign site were automatically redirected to the Reagan tribute, paid for by the Bush/Cheney committee. It replaced the spot usually occupied by the campaign home page.

Undeterred by stubborn facts, Jonah retorts with this bit of clever snarkdom:

If only we thought to say that Bush's social-security privatization plan should have been passed as a tribute to Ronald Reagan. I am absolutely sure Nancy Pelosi & Co. would have agreed instantly with the suggestion.

Now where would an educated and scholarly man like Jonah Goldberg get the idea that Ronald Reagan would have approved of such a plan when President Reagan's actual plan for Social Security was:

. . . motivated by a sense of responsibility -- or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance.

For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent -- but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.

Nonetheless, there was broad bipartisan support for the payroll tax increase because it was part of a deal. The public was told that the extra revenue would be used to build up a trust fund dedicated to the preservation of Social Security benefits, securing the system's future. Thanks to the 1983 act, current projections show that under current rules, Social Security is good for at least 38 more years.

Let that sink in for a moment. Jonah's hero the Great Privatizer signed into law a tax increase that would guarantee Social Security's existence as a government-funded pension program for 60 years. At the time, it was the single largest tax increase in the history of the Republic.

And in case you couldn't guess, Republicans did try to leverage Ronnie's Ghost to raid Social Security:

The House Republican Conference will unveil today its latest prize for rewarding GOP lawmakers: the Ronald Reagan awards.

The honor, named after the late president who was famed for his communications skills, will be given to Members who excel at disseminating the party's message on Social Security reform in their districts.

The program will copy one the Conference implemented in the 108th Congress, when 35 Members received Theodore Roosevelt awards for spreading the gospel on the Medicare prescription drug bill.

"People like to win things," explained Conference Vice Chairman Jack Kingston (Ga.), expressing hope that the chance for an award would motivate lawmakers to hold more workshops and town hall meetings on Social Security.

I've asked the question before, and I'll ask it again: why does modern-day conservatism have to be so jaw-droppingly stupid in practice? Do people like Jonah Goldberg even bother thinking about what they're saying before they commit their ideas to cyberspace? And why oh why does a respected mainstream newspaper like the Los Angeles Times reward this clown with a regular op-ed column?

---Vitelius

Discontents of (Not-So-Distant) Youth

It's not often the Baron finds the need to take a lefty activist site to task, but I gotta call bullshit when I see it:

Add this to President Barack Obama's problems in selling his health care overhaul: A lot of the tech-savvy activists who helped put him in office are young, feeling indestructible and not all that into what they see as an old folks issue.

It's a crucial gap in support and one the White House may have to correct if Obama is to regain the momentum and get Congress to act on his top domestic priority.

Matt Singer, a 26-year-old founder of the liberal group Forward Montana and an activist in the health care trenches, has tried to engage young people.

"Right now we're seeing a big conversation with seniors, but you're not seeing the same mobilization among young people who are President Obama's core constituency," Singer said. "The age demographic most supportive of reform has not been engaged, and it makes me very nervous."

Younger people are generally healthier and rely on less medical care, particularly young working men who make up the largest group that goes voluntarily without health insurance.

Oh please. Younger people are also more likely to be working in entry-level to mid-level jobs. Because their jobs are seen as more "disposable" than more senior-level positions, they're more likely to be laid off at the first sign of an economic downturn. And since they typically earn lower salaries than older workers, they're also more likely to feel the bite in their wallets of any increases in their contributions to employer healthcare plans. The company I work for, for example, has switched its health insurance provider three times in the past six years, and each time the employee contribution has gone up, up and up. Now, I'm a senior-level guy, I make pretty good coin, so while I'm not happy with these developments, I can live with them. But I can see how a lot of my employees, who are young enough to be my kids and who're still paying off student loans and raising young families, and trying to make ends meet in a place like Los Angeles on only $35 grand a year, could feel some real hardship when that extra 100 bucks in pretax income gets skimmed off the top of their paychecks twice a month. I know it would put a pretty big crimp in my budget if I were in their shoes. So I don't think that any theories of the "invincibility of youth" play into this equation at all. Kids nowadays know perfectly well that health insurance is too expensive because, as wage-earners at the lower end of the pay scale, it's especially expensive for them.

It's like this: Barack Obama owes his very election to young people, the 18-to-29-year-olds who formed the bulk of his volunteer army last year and who turned out in record numbers to register and vote for him. So now, after all that sweat and sacrifice, they're supposed to help him implement healthcare policy, too? By doing what---screaming louder than the teabaggers? Packing heat at townhalls?

Simply put, young people in America have already done their job by pooling their boundless energy and resources to pull off what most of us---present company included---would surely have told you a few years ago was a foolish and flighty fantasy: Namely, to succeed in electing a liberal black Democrat named Hussein to the highest office in the land. Now that they've succeeded, they are entitled to expect some tangible results before donning the armor once more and returning to the battlefield. Like them, I didn't spend hundreds of hours in volunteer work, and thousands of dollars of my hard-armed income, so that the likes of Chuck Grassley don't get their feelings hurt in policy discussions, or so a half-measure compromise such as a "public option" gets watered down further by insurance-industry stooges like Kent Conrad. We've done our jobs---now it's time for Obama, and Pelosi, and Harry Reid to stop pussyfooting with the zanies and do their jobs and deliver results.

We've already caved on warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detentions. We've accepted the moderate half-step of cap-and-trade over a more effective carbon tax. We've tolerated the bank bailouts, the executive bonuses, and the appointment of Goldman Sachs as our nation's banker of choice. We're giving war criminals a pass, replaying Vietnam in Afghanistan, putting henhouse foxes in charge of our food policy, and playing nice with rightist legislators who pander to nihilist gun nuts. And all the while we've paid for it---and are still paying for it---with our jobs, our savings, our homes and businesses, and our global reputation. And now, if healthcare reform fails in a filibuster-proof Senate, it's the fault of a bunch of 20-somethings who weren't willing to make more sacrifices for the cause? Give me a fucking break.

Until Obama & Co. can prove that they can finally cinch a deal for us the way we've delivered for them the last two election cycles, we owe them nothing more until November 2010 at the soonest.

---Vitelius

Nice People . . .

. . . come up with the most awesome ways to treat other people!

Sleep deprivation for 11 days straight. Thirty seconds of simulated drowning. "Stress positions." And this was the shit they claimed was actually legal.

More awesomeness with detainees:

In July 2002, [redacted] operations officer participated with another operations officer in a custodial interrogation of a detainee . . . reportedly used a "pressure point" technique; with both of his hands on the detainee's neck, [redacted] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee's carotid artery.

[Redacted] who was facing the shackled detainee, reportedly watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then, the [redacted] shook the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of three applications on the detainee.

But if you want the money shots, proceed to Appendix C:

As we understand it, when the waterboard is used, the subject's body responds as if the subject were drowning---even though the subject may well be aware that he is in fact not drowning. You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm. Thus, although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the fear of drowning, the waterboard does inflict physical pain . . . The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering. (Emphasis added.)

So it's not really torture, it's a controlled acute episode. Someone tell it it to this guy:

The news today that AG Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate criminal abuses of detainees controlled acute episodes is, I suppose, better than nothing. But confining the scope of the investigation to a few rogue CIA interrogators and some jackbooted contractors would send a terrible and ultimately counter-productive message to our fellow citizens, and to the rest of the world: Namely, that in a time of war, only the enlisted men should pay for the crimes of the generals. This is not, if memory serves, a legal defense we respected at the Nuremberg Trials, and it's no more respectable or defensible now simply because "our" Germans, not some "other" Germans, were the perpetrators.

--Vitelius

Question of The Day

Was there any part of the federal bureaucracy that wasn't run like a giant patronage operation during the Bush years?

---Vitelius

Our Amazingly Awesome Recovery

I guess all that Obama has to do nowadays is order Ben Bernanke to make happy talk about the markets every Friday for the next 30 weeks, and we'll be back at Dow 13,000 by next spring, just in time for those end-of-year earning statements. Shareholders get their dividend checks, traders and CEOs get their bonuses, and all will be perfect in our awesome financial sector.

Meanwhile, in America's greatest state:

California's unemployment rate climbed to 11.9 percent in July, the highest number in modern record-keeping.

That's an increase from 11.6 percent in June and considerably higher than the jobless rate of 7.3 percent a year ago.

The U.S. Department of Labor also reported Friday that 87,000 Californians lost jobs last month.

The state continued to see declines in the construction, manufacturing, transportation, trade, finance, education and health and government sectors. The trade, transportation and utilities sectors posted the largest drop, losing 15,900 jobs.

At least the pain is being felt equally these days, and we have the Times to thank for reminding us today:

Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.

Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine.

Well heck, get me a hanky and I'll cry for ya too.

OKay, I don't mean to be too snarky about this piece, because there are actually some genuine nuggets contained within it, though you almost wish any one of the following passages were up near the lede of the story instead of being buried down at the bottom since, after all, it kind of gives away some hints as to who's been fleecing all those angry old teabaggers for the past 30 years. Hint: It's not the illegals.

"We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten,' said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. "Since the early '80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we've entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution."

Few economists expect the country to return to the relatively flat income distribution of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, they say that inequality is likely to remain significantly greater than it was for most of the 20th century. The Obama administration has not proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street or raising the top income-tax rate to anywhere near 70 percent, its level as recently as 1980. Market forces that have increased inequality, like globalization, are also not going away . . .

Perhaps the broadest question is what a hit to the wealthy would mean for the middle class and the poor. The best-known data on the rich comes from an analysis of Internal Revenue Service returns by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists. Their work shows that in the late 1970s, the cutoff to qualify for the highest-earning one ten-thousandth of households was roughly $2 million, in inflation-adjusted, pretax terms. By 2007, it had jumped to $11.5 million.

The gains for the merely affluent were also big, if not quite huge. The cutoff to be in the top 1 percent doubled since the late 1970s, to roughly $400,000.

By contrast, pay at the median---which was about $50,000 in 2007---rose less than 20 percent, Census data shows. Near the bottom of the income distribution, the increase was about 12 percent . . .

In the three decades after World War II, when the incomes of the rich grew more slowly than those of the middle class, the top marginal rate ranged from 70 to 91 percent. Mr. Piketty, one of the economists who analyzed the I.R.S. data, argues that these high rates did not affect merely post-tax income. They also helped hold down the pretax incomes of the wealthy, he says, by giving them less incentive to make many millions of dollars.

Since 1980, tax rates on the affluent have fallen more than rates on any other group; this year, the top marginal rate is 35 percent. President Obama has proposed raising it to 39 percent and has said he would consider a surtax on families making more than $1 million a year, which could push the top rate above 40 percent.

What any policy changes will mean for the nonwealthy remains unclear. There have certainly been periods when the rich, the middle class and the poor all have done well (like the late 1990s), as well as periods when all have done poorly (like the last year). For much of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, both the middle class and the wealthy received raises that outpaced inflation.

Yet there is also a reason to think that the incomes of the wealthy could potentially have a bigger impact on others than in the past: as a share of the economy, they are vastly larger than they once were.

It really does speak volumes about the tectonic shift that has occurred in our political discourse over the past 30 years when the mere suggestion of tinkering with the tax code is likened to the imposing of totalitarian values and the destruction of wealth at the same time that the people who blew a $10 trillion hole in the economy by gambling on million-dollar mirages in places like Riverside County are rewarded with generous government assistance. I don't know how it's possible, but we really have become more demonstrably stupid as a nation since 1980. If that was conservatism's primary objective, then mission accomplished and bonus checks all around.

---Vitelius

Hard to Believe This Would Be AcceptableIn Any Other American Industry

You may recall that one of our Foodie-in-Chief's first big post-inauguration speeches was a discourse on food safety. Well, here's a good place to start, if you needed any suggestions:

Advances in agricultural technology---including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops---have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech companies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company's intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering.

One can imagine the public outcry that would ensue if, say, a car company refused to submit to industry-independent crash testing, or would only release the results of tests that were concluded to its liking. Imagine a tobacco company, or a liquor distiller, or a firearms manufacturer, or a producer of herbicides and pesticides attempting to stake the same legal claim. You can see where this is going already.

The argument, of course, is preposterous on its face. A genetically modified seed is no more the exclusive "intellectual property" of Monsanto than the design of a Camry is the intellectual property of Toyota. Certain patent and trademark regulations will always apply to easily defined proprietaries, but once that seed---like a car---passes hands from the manufacturer to the consumer, it becomes our property, and we have every legal right to require the corporations that are mass-producing our food to submit to the same kinds of regulations that manufacturers of other consumer goods routinely accede to as a condition of doing business. Legitimate questions have been raised in recent years about the potential effects of genetically modified organisms on human infertility, autoimmune disorders, and obesity in adults and children. I'm not saying out of hand that GMOs should be banned, or that they even pose a potential health and safety risk. We simply do not know for certain, and it is because of the paucity of independent data to either verify or debunk the myriad theories that have surrounded GMOs that we don't know these things.

Unfortunately, despite his right-minded rhetoric on the issue, Obama's early choices in the formulation of food safety policy are not promising---certainly not when one of your top advisers at the FDA is an ex-Monsanto guy, or when your own track record as a US Senator is flush with glowing endorsements of ethanol subsidies. (This is one campaign issue where, scary as it is to admit, I was in same exact corner as John McCain.) Ezra explains in a pre-inaugural post, and applies some broader perspective:

Despite the momentary flash of promise when Obama mentioned Michael Pollan's work in an interview, his subsequent appointments and statements haven't demonstrated an evident commitment to understanding farm policy as a question of food rather than a question of food producer interests. Indeed, Obama's agricultural adviser, Marshall Matz, is a partner at a law and lobbying firm that represents agricultural interests against federal regulators. And he also served as co-chair of Obama's rural outreach committee, which neatly places him on the wrong side of another problem in farm policy: The tendency to understand it as an issue that's mainly of interest to rural Americans who produce food rather than urban or suburban residents who eat food. That's two for two.

But these are not ideological fights. It's not the product of a disagreement between food advocates and Obama. Farm policy is classic case of interest group politics. It's a low priority issue. There's little media attention or non-profit oversight. A small group -- in this case, producers of food -- is directly affected and loudly vocal. They dominate the issue and bend the outcomes to their benefit. The broader community of folks who eat food -- all of us, more or less -- don't clearly see the connection between policy and plate and so pay little attention to federal action. Our interests are largely lost because there's little in the way of political reward for serving the silent. Expecting Obama to change that because he read a magazine article is a sucker's bet. Obama's picks are traditional because he's a rational politician, and he's subject to the same incentives all politicians are subject to. The answer isn't in better, or more enlightened, politicians. It's in changing the surrounding political incentives. People who want farm policy to become food policy need to find ways to become louder.

In his State of the Union speech last January, Obama ruffled some feathers by calling for reductions in federal farm subsidies. That's fine as far as it goes, but in the grander scheme of things, it's virtually impossible to promote the virtues of ethanol or sit on the sidelines and do nothing to regulate GMO foodstocks and claim to be an ethical minder of the public purse when some of the biggest industrial producers of ethanol and GMO crops are companies that are also among the biggest recipients of federal farm subsidies. Ezra's right---we need to get louder.

---Vitelius

Awesomeness of Small Government Confirmed

Sometimes I wonder if we haven't already poisoned ourselves to eventual extinction and we just haven't figured it out yet.

No fish can escape mercury pollution. That's the take-home message from a federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the country.

The toxic substance was found in every fish sampled, a finding that underscores how widespread mercury pollution has become.

But while all fish had traces of contamination, only about a quarter had mercury levels exceeding what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people eating average amounts of fish.

Good to know! Since I eat fish an average of three to four times a week, guess that means I can count on at least one toxic dinner a week. And I thought this shit was supposed to be good for me.

Who to credit for this ecological awesomeness? Let's hear it for Clean Coal™!

The main source of mercury to most of the streams tested, according to the researchers, is emissions from coal-fired power plants. The mercury released from smokestacks here and abroad rains down into waterways, where natural processes convert it into methylmercury -- a form that allows the toxin to wind its way up the food chain into fish.

Some of the highest levels in fish were detected in the remote blackwater streams along the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, where bacteria in surrounding forests and wetlands help in the conversion. The second-highest concentration of mercury was detected in largemouth bass from the North Fork of the Edisto River near Fairview Crossroads, S.C.

Maybe this is why so many Southerners seem so brain-damaged. Because they really are.

And let's hear it for the General Mining Act of 1872!

Mercury was also found in high concentrations in western streams that drain areas mined for mercury and gold. The most contaminated sample came from smallmouth bass collected from the Carson River at Dayton, Nev., an area tainted with mercury from gold mining. At 58 other streams, mostly in the West, the acidic conditions created by mining could also be contributing to the mercury levels, the researchers said.

I give up. Resistance is futile. I'm having salmon tonight, so blast, baby, blast!

---Vitelius

The Concern Troll of the Year Award

The nominations have been flooding the Baron's inbox lately. Today's contender: progressives shouldn't boycott Whole Foods over its CEO's stand on healthcare reform because it only hurts Whole Foods' employees. And no right-thinking progressive would ever want to be guilty of oppressing workers, no?

But boycotting Whole Foods is a futile and impotent act that does nothing to get health reform passed. (Indeed, news of the boycott has sparked vows from conservatives that they'll now go out of their way to shop at the store.) It won't hurt Mackey; he's set for life. His employees . . . are the ones who stand to suffer.

"You latte-sipping, arugula-munching liberal douchebags: as much as I hate having to deal with you every day in the store, please don't fucking boycott," wrote a "local Whole Foods employee." "You and I both know that it's not going to hurt Mackey, and that any financial effect that the company feels from this is going to manifest itself in A) higher prices for those customers left behind, B) wage freezes and/or benefits reductions for the little guys like me, down in the trenches having to put up with our new wing-nut neo-con customer base."

Liberals like to think the angry nutcases are all on the other side of the aisle. But punishing people who disagree with you isn't a liberal value. And neither is going without high-quality organic produce. It's time to call off the boycott.

Well now. If you and you co-workers were members of a union, you wouldn’t have to worry about arbitrary wage freezes and benefit reductions being imposed unilaterally by management, now, would you? Too bad for you that your CEO is actively campaigning against the Employee Free Choice Act, and has fought unionization at his stores for years. Benefits? How many benefits actually accrue to a workforce with a turnover rate of 25 percent per year?

Or would you be talking about the Wal-Mart-style low-cost “catastrophic” healthcare plan that Whole Foods’ predominantly 20-something employee base will rarely if ever need?

Personally, I don’t have a problem with guys like John Mackey saying whatever they want about healthcare. Everyone’s got a right to their opinion, as far as it goes. But when your own employee healthcare plan is so heavily biased towards the treatment of diseases that your workers will seldom contract, and you don’t want to give your workers the option of cutting a more favorable deal via the power of collective bargaining, then as far as I’m concerned, you can sleep in the bed you’ve made for yourself. I won’t be boycotting my neighborhood Whole Foods per se, but I will be cutting down on my visits there. There are plenty of other organic-food options around these days.

Memo to the so-called “local Whole Foods employee”: make sure your store hires some more help for the meat counter. You're gonna need it. (H/t Atrios.)

---Vitelius

It's Not Like We're Asking to SeeTheir Birth Certificates or Anything

Over at the Monthly, the ever-steadfast Steve Benen gets taken to the woodshed by some clown at the Weekly Standard over Steve's assertion that Congressional Democrats should forget about bargaining with Republicans over healthcare reform until further notice:

Benen and other "progressives" support negotiation and compromise with Iran and North Korea, but Republicans? Forget about it.

Well yes, actually, it’s true enough---we "progressives" rather would prefer that. Especially when the government of a country as repressive as North Korea has shown in the not-so-distant past that, whatever its faults and failings, it’s willing to discuss and resolve important policy issues with its adversaries—--and when necessary, to even make unilateral concessions---to defuse tensions and to achieve a desired outcome. It speaks volumes about the current state of the Republican leadership in Washington that it's willing to be even more intractable in its negotiations with the current administration than a totalitarian crackpot like Kim Jong-Il.

So let's make a deal: when people like Chuck Grassley, John Kyl and John Boehner decide to finally grow up, and offer up some proof that they’re willing to show as much flexibility in discussing healthcare reform as the North Korean politburo has shown in discussing nuclear proliferation, we’re ready to talk. Until then, shut the hell up and stop your bellyaching.

---Vitelius

Hey, Now We Know He Wasn't Born in Kenya

Birtherism yesterday, bitherism today, and birtherism forever!

From the comments:

Oddly enough, being born in a state or territory makes you an American citizen, just ask Charles Curtis, Vice-President in the Hoover administration, born in Kansas a year before it gained statehood or Barry Goldwater, born in the Arizona territory, was still eligible to be President.

And let's not forget to mention the first seven Presidents of the United States, who were also not natural-born citizens of this country because the United States of America did not even exist when they were born.

And, oh, a guy named McCain. Born in the Panama Canal Zone a year before Congress granted full citizenship rights to Americans that were born there. Just because conservatism is anti-intellectual in principle, does that mean that conservatism has to be so jaw-droppingly stupid in practice?

---Vitelius

Plus Ça Change Vista

From the patriot who brought his AR-15 killing machine semiautomatic rifle to Obama's VFW speech the other day:

We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote.

Compare and contrast to the wisdom expressed by the godfather of intellectual conservatism:

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

Conservative intellectuals: in America, they simply do not exist, and have not existed in decades. Is it even possible to be both conservative and an intellectual in America today?

---Vitelius

This Might be Worse Than Doing Nothing at All

If single-payer represents the proverbial loaf of bread and a public option represents half a loaf, are the Obama really only going to settle, after all this time and effort, for a piece of crust?

President Barack Obama and his top aides are signaling that they’re prepared to drop a government insurance option from a final health-reform deal if that's what's needed to strike a compromise on Obama's top legislative priority.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Sunday that the public option was "not the essential element" of the overhaul. A day earlier, Obama downplayed the public option during a Colorado town hall meeting, saying it was "just one sliver" of the debate.

"Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option," said [Sen. Kent] Conrad, who has pushed an alternative proposal to create a network of consumer cooperatives, on Fox News Sunday. "There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort."

So a Democratic Senator from a state with barely over a half million residents, who has received more than $360,000 in campaign contributions from the insurance industry since 2003, will be allowed in the end to be the final arbiter in the universal healthcare debate. Such is the balance of power in our broken government these days. Oh, and nice touch making the announcement on Hate Speech Fox News Sunday.

"Nothing has changed," said Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform. "The president has always said that what is essential is that health insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals."

She should have said the public option is the only way, not the best way---save a single-payer system---to achieve those goals.

But taken together, the remarks from Obama, Sebelius and Conrad suggest the White House is preparing supporters for a health care compromise that may well exclude the government option -- which could help Obama win enough votes for a sweeping overhaul but touch off a nasty battle inside his own party between liberals and more moderate members who have resisted a bigger government role in health care.

Of course Kent Conrad is right. There aren't enough votes in the Senate---and probably not in the House of Representatives, either---to pass a federally administered public-option healthcare program. One need only examine the obscene amounts of money being shoveled into the coffers of Democratic members from Congress from the for-profit healthcare and insurance industries to realize that we now live in a country that is governed by an unassailable corporatist majority---and now, Obama's only option is to shepherd any healthcare-reform plan through the Congress to prevent the GOP from claiming a preemptive victory over the signature plank of his domestic agenda.

But of course, if regional co-ops are to be the only alternative to private healthcare to which we will be allowed, the GOP will have effectively won the greater war. Because regional non-profit co-ops, absent federal mandates or guarantees, have a proven track record of failure.

We have tried cooperatives before. During the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the cooperative movement in the United States, the Farm Security Administration encouraged the development of health cooperatives. At one point, 600,000 mainly low-income rural Americans belonged to health cooperatives. The movement failed. The cooperatives were small and undercapitalized. Physicians opposed the cooperative movement and boycotted cooperatives. When the FSA removed support in 1947, the movement collapsed. Only the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound survived. Over time, moreover, even Group Health, though nominally a cooperative has become indistinguishable from commercial insurers‚ underwrites based on health status, pays high executive salaries, and accumulates large surpluses rather than lower its rates.

And even if a co-operative actually succeeded, what's to prevent it from re-organizing as a for-profit entity?

Once we had a nationwide system of nonprofit health organizations. While each was local, they were tied into a loose national confederation. Since they were nonprofit, the idea was that their primary goal was to have the interest of their members at heart. The name of this national nonprofit organization?

Blue Cross.

In the last several decades Blue Cross organizations privatized themselves in massive numbers, with the help of supportive state and national politicians. There is no reason to believe that any cooperative will remain nonprofit if it becomes successful. The continued benevolence of any cooperative will depend on the direction and guidance it receives from politicians like Sen. Conrad. But even now, in the courtship phase of this process, Sen. Conrad doesn't hesitate to discuss the establishment of effective cooperatives with passive and indifferent language.

What will happen ten years from now, when a few executives have the chance to get rich by converting your cooperative to for-profit status? Can we count on state and national politicians to take a brave stand and refuse them, even in the face of the massive campaign contributions they'll be able to offer?

I think we know the answer to that.

It really does speak volumes about the state of our political discourse in this country when the most perceptive insight into what the potential implications that the abandonment of the public option holds for the Obama administration comes not from some public policy analyst or think-tank veteran but from a former radio talk-show host:

Ultimately, if the president decides he's going to go with a reform effort that doesn't include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right-wing base that's been told this is a plot to kill Grandma, and he will have achieved something that doesn't change health care very much and that doesn't save us very much money and won't do much for the American people. It's not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

It is one thing to want to see a healthcare-reform law passed. To want to see any reform law passed, at any cost, is to betray a measure of desperation and/or cravenness that will only alienate Obama's most fervent base of support while doing nothing to mollify the rabid opposition that has already pledged to destroy him. Seems to me it would be far, far better for Obama to stick to his guns and go down in flames on the healthcare reform issue if necessary---the better with which to plead the case that he really did come to Washington to do battle with the vested interests and Speak Truth to Power®, even if it means admitting to failure in the short term. Remember, Bill Clinton's cataclysmic "failure" on healthcare reform in 1993 had no ultimate effect on his re-election prospects three years later. And should Obama likewise be re-elected in 2012, he is free to re-visit the healthcare-reform issue at a later date, perhaps when public sentiment, and the political winds of Washington, are more favorable to him. But vacillating and prevaricating between federally insured healthcare and autonomous regional co-ops, as the administration has done for the last two weeks, only serves to confuse and befuddle the electorate, and makes it all that much easier for the birthers, the deathers, and the other crazy people in the GOP to make the case to independent voters that Obama's motives are suspect and not to be trusted.

If nothing else, you'd think the administration's various members would try a little harder to stick to one unified message on healthcare reform, and try to keep their stories straight. At this point, even I'm perplexed.

Update: Yes, yes, I know, the Clinton healthcare debacle of '93 is widely considered a determining factor in the Democrats' loss of Congress the following year, and in the subsequent rise of the Gingrichites. But what in due honesty would be the seminal difference between, say, a GOP-led Senate versus the Democratic-led Senate of today? Democratic activists have done a stellar job of electing more Democrats to the Senate for the past two election cycles, but has the Senate grown appreciably more liberal in its make-up? Has the House of Representatives? The answer, to me, seems debatable at best. Want proof? Look no further.

---Vitelius