Armageddon

This is not good:

Look- if Feingold goes down, I don’t know how you continue to scream that the Democrats have been too moderate. We’re clearly a center-right nation that deserves to be ruled by teabagging clowns and their wealthy masters. And that will be the lesson everyone learns- we need to move to the right, because clearly everyone was too liberal!

At any rate, go here to give:

And for the life of me, I simply do not understand the enthusiasm gap, and you manic progressives can figure out how you are going to change your script from blaming Obama for not being liberal enough, because this is Feingold we are talking about. If you aren’t enthusiastic enough as a Democrat to go out and vote for Feingold, you deserve what comes with Republican rule.

*** Update ***

Yes, I am being unfair to progressives, although seriously, wtf is a progressive? I want out of Iraq and Afghanistan, want the military budget cut by 60%, want all the tax cuts to expire and have capital gains increased, I’m pro-choice I’m actively pro-abortion because there are too many of you out there, anti-death penalty, pro stem cell research, pro legalization, if I had my way I would nationalize the health care industry because that is the only way we will ever control costs (and that is a complete shift from my thoughts just a few years ago), etc. Am I not a progressive? Or do I not spend enough time wailing about how the Democrats have let me down?

I’m kind of in shock. I can not, for the life of me, understand how anyone could think Republican rule would not be disastrous. Even if the Democrats suck. And it would be bad enough with run of the mill Republicans, but with the teabagging nutcases running this year. Good grief. It’s terrifying and the nation won’t recover in my lifetime.

ODS: Dinesh Dismantled

Many thanks to commentor El Cid for his link to the brilliant Economist smackdown of Dinesh D’Souza’s weird racialist “Obama Derangment Syndrome“:

I DON’T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America’s centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D’Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s.
[...]

Most Americans wouldn’t have a hard time answering the question of why the government ought to guarantee all kids a good education. “Because it’s not the kids’ fault that their parents aren’t rich PhD’s” pretty much covers it… So why would Mr D’Souza perform the moral contortionist’s act necessary to justify elitism in education as integral to a “free society”? Well, here’s an explanation modeled on the one Mr D’Souza provides for Mr Obama’s views:

If Mr D’Souza grew up amongst a tiny hereditary elite desperately trying to protect its privileged status in a huge and bitterly poor third-world country, that would explain why he wants to make sure disadvantaged children are denied the educational opportunities his daughter receives.

What about his weird instinct to dredge up the irrelevant topic of anti-colonialism in explaining Barack Obama’s run-of-the-mill center-left political agenda? Using the same phrasing:

If Mr D’Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.

It would, however, be unfair to explain Mr D’Souza’s views this way. First of all, I’m no expert on Indian history or the caste system in Goa, and the description above may be just as shallow a caricature as the one Mr D’Souza provides of post-colonial East African politics in his inflammatory article. Specifically, I know no more about Mr D’Souza’s family’s political views than he does about Barack Obama’s father’s (about which he appears to know strikingly little, given the wealth of information available on the subject)... [A]nybody who wants to know “how D’Souza thinks” is free to look up what he’s written in books and articles over the years, just as Mr D’Souza could criticise the views of Barack Obama by referring to things Mr Obama has said and done.

By all means, read the whole thing, because it’s very cheering to know that there are still a few sane people with access to the levers of Respectable Major Media Access.

Things Might Not Go As Planned

This:

Can a highly trained nurse deliver anesthetics as well as a physician who has specialized in anesthesiology, or does the nurse require close medical supervision? That issue emerges from two recent studies and from California’s decision last year to join 14 other states in freeing the nurses from a federal requirement that they be supervised by a physician. Colorado seems poised to join the group. The issue is potentially important to patients and to health care reformers seeking to restrain costs and reduce reliance on high-priced medical specialists.

And this:

In a snapshot of systemic waste, researchers have calculated that more than half of the 354 million doctor visits made each year for acute medical care, like for fevers, stomachaches and coughs, are not with a patient’s primary physician, and that more than a quarter take place in hospital emergency rooms.

The authors of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, said it highlighted a significant question about the new federal health care law: can access to primary care be maintained, much less improved, when an already inadequate and inefficient system takes on an expected 32 million newly insured customers?

“If history is any guide, things might not go as planned,” they wrote. “If primary care lags behind rising demand, patients will seek care elsewhere.”

I certainly hope patients seek care elsewhere, and I suspect they’re going to insist on it.
Twenty years ago I didn’t have health insurance and I made too much to qualify for Medicaid, and I needed prenatal care. I went here.
It’s a low-cost county clinic, and I got great medical care, although I rarely saw the physician.
We conducted the whole health care debate, Left and Right, on the chosen terms of the opposition, and it became all about loss and fear and scarcity, but it doesn’t have to work that way.
If 32 million new patients (and we’re now calling them “patients” or “customers” instead of “the uninsured”, they magically changed status, apparently) need access to affordable primary care and the medical industry doesn’t respond with more primary care physicians, states are simply going to look to alternatives.
That would be a great result that could speed up changes that benefit everyone.

No One Could Have Predicted

No one could have predicted that the outcome of Gibbs’ stupid remarks would be a multi-month poutrage in which the media would rush to highlight Obama’s mythical problems with the left:

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: With White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs lashing out at President Obama’s liberal critics, a card-carrying member of Gibbs’ “professional left” joined us on ABC/Washington Post’s “Top Line” today. (Yes, she actually brought a card – a digital version.)

Jane Hamsher, the founder of the liberal blog Firedoglake.com, told us that Gibbs’ swipe reflects a White House that’s taken the left for granted – inattention that she said could hurt Democratic candidates in 2010 and beyond.

“It went over like a lead balloon—particularly in August when all the members of Congress are back in their home states, campaigning, trying to whip up enthusiasm,” Hamsher told us. “We’re seeing tremendous demoralization amongst the sort of Democratic base….

Oh, wait. I predicted this would happen… I will simply restate what I wrote in the comments a few hours ago:

It really is odd. The more I move to the left the more I hate the people I agree with. Guess it is like family. I love them, but really need a break after a few hours with them. Because they make me so GOD DAMNED MAD.

Gibbs said something stupid and counter-productive. Now we can spend the next few months going on tv and tweeting about how offended we are and how much the White House sucks. This will no doubt be helpful for all involved.

At some point I wish people would realize that Rick Klein and those fanning the flames don’t give two hoots in hell about progressive issues. All evidence points to the fact that they are actively working against us.

*** Update ***

And by the way, in case anyone is wondering, the next step in the “I AM RELEVANT” charade we go through every couple of months is that Warren will be nominated to the new agency. Rather than acknowledging that the Obama team has sent signals all along that she would be nominated, we will all be required to pretend that it was a gift to progressives who rose up and showed how mighty we are in the wake of the Gibbs remarks. See! We are important! And then, when the blue dogs and Republicans cockblock her nomination, we can spend weeks writing that the White House secretly hates progressives and Obama didn’t do enough and all he needed to do was use the bully pulpit and this was just 11 dimensional chess to slap liberals in the face. Just like Dawn Johnsen. And Ben Nelson and Lieberdouche and the others will get off without their perfidy in blocking the nomination even mentioned.

Anyone want to bet?

A Serious Question

I maintain that the remarks from Gibbs were pretty damned stupid and unhelpful, but after a day of reading my twitter feed, I’ve had it up to here with the wailing and gnashing of teeth from, well, the professional left. Is there anything more pathetic than a group of people who so desperately need validation that any remark from the WH that seems to diss them will start a multi-day pity party? Even crazier, most of these people are bloggers- OH NOES! SOMEONE SAID SOMETHING MEAN ON THE INTERNET! Grow up.

At any rate, as I sit here waiting for special Ed to douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in a teary farewell to his MSNBC audience to protest the remarks by Gibbs, I’m wondering what exactly would have made the very vocal few happy. And I mean vocal few, as this PPP piece points out:

I feel like I write the ‘most liberals still like Obama’ blog post every few months but stuff keeps on happening to necessitate writing it again so I will:

On the national poll we’ll release this week 85% of liberals approve of the job Obama is doing to 12% disapproving. 88% support his health care plan looking back with only 7% opposed.

Not only are those numbers good, but they’re steady. Obama’s favor with liberals hasn’t been on the decline. In May his approval with liberals was 87/10. In February it was 81/15. In November it was 87/4. Even as his ratings have declined overall he’s stayed in that sort of mid-80s range with liberal voters.

So what would it take for the few to be happy? Personally, I’m not satisfied with the job they are doing (unemployment is horrible, they’ve spent too much time negotiating with Republicans, the drone wars, the civil liberties issues, Lloyd Blankfein is still a free man, etc.), and think there have been some real failings and some real let-downs. But I will belly crawl over broken glass while someone pours lemon juice and rubbing alcohol on me to vote for the Democrats in November.

Really, Robert?

I’m not sure what pisses me off more- that Robert Gibbs didn’t have he good sense to keep his damned mouth shut, or that I’m going to have to listen to the professional left justifiably bitching all day. Can you imagine how long it would take before Ari was polishing his resume if he had dissed the “christian right?”

And even that comparison is unfair. The christian right want to impose their damned values on everyone. The “professional left” wants clean water, jobs, and government accountability.

Way to help the GOTV efforts, Gibbs. Asshole.

“Why Has He Fallen Short?”

Given the local fondness for Paul Krugman, I found this passage from Frank Rich’s review of Jonathan Alter’s The Promise for the NY Review of Books particularly interesting:

... The Promise depicts a carelessness and dysfunctionality in the economic team that at times matches that revealed by Rolling Stone in the military and civilian leadership of the team managing the Afghanistan war. Geithner’s inexplicable serial income tax delinquencies, as elucidated by Alter, should have disqualified him for Treasury secretary just as Stanley McChrystal’s role in the Pentagon’s political coverup of Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death should have barred him from the top military job in Afghanistan. Summers’s Machiavellian efforts to minimize or outright exclude the input of ostensible administration economic players like Paul Volcker, Austan Goolsbee, and Christina Romer seem to have engaged his energies as much as the policy issues at hand.

In April 2009, at Obama’s insistence, a group of economists that Summers had blocked from the Oval Office, including Volcker, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Alan Blinder, was invited to a White House dinner. That colloquy has been cited ever since by White House aides in response to complaints that the administration’s economic circle is too insular. The dinner was a one-off, however, and the liberal economists’ ideas about tougher financial reform and a more ambitious stimulus package have languished.

Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.

Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

Conservatives Against the Franchise

I wanted to front-page commentor Kay, because I agree this is the root of a lot of the current conservative strategy:

[T]here really is a basic split between liberals and conservatives on voting.

Conservatives focus on voter fraud. Liberals focus on voter access. One presumes denial of the franchise, the other presumes exercising the franchise.

There’s no middle ground, either.

I would fully expect the Bush DOJ to try to exclude, and I would fully expect the Obama DOJ to try to include.

It goes back to (IMO, but I think the state laws conservatives pass make this abundantly clear) that conservatives don’t really believe that voting is a fundamental right. They treat it as a privilege, legally, like driving is.

They can’t say that, it’s not mainstream, so they flip the liberal argument (disenfranchisement) on access, and claim that their votes are being diluted by access, and therefore they are disenfranchised.

In any event, I think it’s a fundamental liberal-conservative battle, and there’s not going to be a compromise. I’ve read on it for years, and I’m not budging. I don’t imagine Holder is either. We are not persuaded. Not a bit.

The fraud contingent gained a lot of ground in the years after 2000, which was the opposite of what I expected, after the Bush v Gore debacle. They passed a LOT of state law that went to fraud.

The fact is, the more barriers to voting you put up, the better conservatives do. They can’t expand their vote, so they work hard to limit the opposition’s vote.

Conservatives don’t want poor people voting, non-white people voting, women or urban renters or young people voting. An ‘Originalist’ society where only white property-owning men of a certain age were allowed to weigh in would be a happy happy world for the John Robertses, John McCains, Karl Roves, Rupert Murdochs, and Glen Becks among us. The rest of us forget that bedrock at our peril.

Something About Mary

John’s post about the anger in NOLA, and Mary Landrieu’s tepid response, got me wondering about Mary.

She spent a little over $11 million to get elected in 2008 with 52% of the vote. She got about $365K from individuals and groups associated with the oil and gas industry during that run.

The only other Democrat elected to statewide office in Louisiana is Attorney General Buddy Caldwell. There’s a single Democratic Representative, Charlie Melancon, who is running against David Vitter this year. Melancon’s raised about half of the $5 million Vitter has in the bank, and Cook rates that seat as “likely Republican”.

So, if you’re a Democrat in Louisiana, you need to raise twice as much money as a Republican to win a seat, and you’ll have to genuflect to some pretty ugly interests to get your cash. If you’re a Republican, you can fuck whores and cruise to re-election. If you ever wonder about Landrieu’s strange politics, just keep that in mind.

Where Are The Lemonade Springs?

Some Democratic operative emailed me this USA Today piece, Tax Bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950:

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

“The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts,” says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Also, too, USA Today says that the average income in the USA is $102,000. I think they mean “average income for a married-couple family“. Even so, I remember when $100K/year was big money.