Dump Baucus' plan

Maybe the three Republican members of Senator Baucus' "Gang of Six" have done us a favor by not going along with a health care bill. Because it would have been even worse than this one that seems to be pleasing nobody --- except . . . those who we shouldn't be trying to please: drug companies and insurance companies.

I'm not bothering to read the fine print on any of these bills, because they're going to change. But just going by the headlines, Baucus' bill is not the answer.

A couple of days ago, there was a headline on Huffington Post quoting a former insurance company spokesman saying that the Baucus bill was a complete give-away to the insurance companies.

Today, the headline from the New York Times is: "Baucus Plan Pleases Drug Makers, But Few Others.

So why have we been waiting for the Senate Finance Committee to write the bill, when the Senate Health Committee turned in a creditable bill months ago, and the House combined three committees' plans and passed a bill months ago?

Who anointed Baucus? Besides the health care industry itself, of course, with their generous campaign contributions.

Ralph

Baucus blows it

We've been waiting around for months while the Senate Finance Committee dithered under Chairman Max Baucus' attempts to draw up a health care reform bill that would have bipartisan support. And he's had this "Gang of Six," three Dems and three Repubs -- all from very small states that in total represent a tiny fraction of the population -- who were going to reach an agreement. Which they haven't, because two of the Republicans have said 'no way,' and the other one is still holding out for more.

And now they're about to come out with something that doesn't satisfy anybody, it seems.

Quoting from George Stephanopolis from ABC online:

Following up on his This Week appearance where he promised to fight on for the public option, Sen. Jay Rockefeller blasted the draft bill produced by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus: “there is no way in its present form that I vote for it unless it changes in the amendment process by vast amounts.”

He’s not alone. Fellow Finance Committee member Ron Wyden is livid too. Expect a rocky mark-up next week. As one top Democrat told me, the fundamental problem is that

Democrats “are being asked to support a bipartisan bill that doesn’t have bipartisan support.”

He goes on to say that Maine's Senator Olympia Snowe, the Republican thought most likely to vote for the bill, has said she's not ready to sign on; and it will be presented to the full committee tomorrow without her endorsement.

So -- let's don't go down this road again, as we did with the stimulus bill, where Obama and the Democrats watered down the bill to get Republican support, and then they didn't vote for it anyway.

No more bipartisan bills that don't get bipartisan support. Why do that? It's crazy. That's giving away the family farm. Don't do it.

Ralph

MDs support public plan

A recent poll by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation found that by a large majority, the nation's physicians support public health care plans.

27% supported a private only insurance system.

63% support a system with both private insurance and a public plan

10% support an entirely public health care system

In summary: a whopping 73% of physicians support some sort of public plan for health care.

That should carry some kind of weight -- but it probably doesn't. At least among those who have the votes in Congress.

It's interesting: of Georgia's 13 members of the House of Representatives, three of them are physicians, all Republicans and all opposed to the Democratic proposed reforms, including the public plan.

I guess what that means is that doctors who run for Congress are, by and large, of a different mind set than those who don't. But at least it should be known that they do not speak for the medical profession.

Ralph

Census report: bad news for Bush

The Atlantic reports that the annual U. S. Census Report on income, poverty, and access to health care, released last Thursday, contains bad news for the Bush legacy.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

This is also bad news for Republicans who are still chanting their tax-cut mantra like a perseverating deranged person who can't help himself -- or doesn't know anything else to do. This report seems to settle that once and for all: tax cuts for the wealthy do not benefit the average citizen. The "trickle down" theory is a lie.

So the summary page on the economic experience of average Americans under the past two presidents would look like this:

Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.

Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.

Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 percent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 percent.

Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.

Nor was this the result of economic collapse in 2008, which didn't really kick in until the last few months of Bush's term. All of these measures were already essentially the same before that.

The article concludes:

But at the least, the wretched two-term record compiled by the younger Bush on income, poverty and access to health care should compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

Ralph

Does anit-Obamaism = racism?

Maureen Dowd, whom I don't hold in the highest regard as a columnist because of her snide and too-cutesy metaphors, wrote a more serious piece in yesterday's New York Times about Joe Wilson's disrespect during President Obama's speech to Congress.

She said had formerly disagreed that racism is at the bottom of the anti-Obama sentiments because other reform-minded presidents have always had their shrill detractors: FDR had Father Coughlin, Truman had McCarthy, and JFK the John Birchers.

But Dowd said that Joe Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president convinced her that "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." She quoted African-American Congressman Jim Clyburn (D-SC) as saying that these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing Obama as president.

You can imagine this angry white Southerner sitting there being lectured to by a black man standing before Congress in his rightful role as president of the United States, and it was just more than he could take. In his shouted "You lie," there is an implied extra word: "You lie, boy."

Dowd made a cogent observation: "For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both."

Worth pondering, but that's not the complete answer. The anti-Obama cult is not just in the South. I think it's a more generic fear among those who feel their way of life is being threatened, and it focuses on different things. For some it's the illegal immigrants; for others, it's their guns or jobs. Others it's a more abstract and paranoid "government control" or fear of the Other or whatever hot button issue their preachers have fulminated against: abortion, gays, taxes, Muslims.

Fear and ignorance are dangerous motivators. Combine fear and ignorance with power -- and guns -- and we have a serious problem.

Ralph

Let's change the subject

I actually do have other interests besides the idiotic antics and the mendacity of our elected officials.

Like serious theater. So, as I was reading the announcements for the new theater season, a few upcoming star turns caught my eye.

There will be a number of celebrity actors starring in serious theater works this season. Maybe with the bad economic situation, they're hoping the names will draw crowds. Most will probably also be worth seeing for the quality of their work.

Helen Mirren will star in Racine's great tragedy Phaedra at the National Theater in Washington. She should handle that quite well, after solving all those crimes and then playing both Queens, Elizabeth I and II.

Cate Blanchett (another former QE I) will do Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullman. It opens in Sydney but will come to Washington and Brooklyn Academy of Music. If she can be a believable Bob Dylan in that film about him, perhaps she can also embody the vaporous Blanche; but I worry about the accent, having to go from Australian to Southern faux gentility. But Cate has done some amazing acting. Hmm. A Swedish actress directing an Australian actress in this quintessentially American play.

Jude Law will bring his Hamlet to Broadway for a limited run. I would have been skeptical, but reviews from the London run have been great; and a recent New York Times interview with him suggests a real immersion and understanding of the role. I saw Ralph Fienes' Hamlet from the front row of a small New York theater -- so close that I found myself ducking during the duel scene. He emphasized the brimming rage of Hamlet more than the indecision.

Philip Seymour Hoffman will play the villainous Iago in Othello at the NY Public Theater. Now that should be great. Much better than his miscast (in my opinion) priest role in the film of Doubt. I saw his early career performance in the Broadway production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, as the alcoholic son to Vanessa Redgrave's extraordinary drug-addled, neurotic mother. This was many years ago, and I still remember the way she conveyed her mood and the level of her drugged state with her hands: your attention became riveted on those nervous finger movements and the subtle shifts from agitated fidgets to somnolent repose.

Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig open a new play in NY, A Steady Rain, about two cops who handle a domestic disturbance that changes them forever. Star power, grade A; acting quality, remains to be seen.

And this one made me scratch my head and wonder what they were thinking -- or is there something I don't know about her? Annette Benning as Euripides' Medea -- about as heavy a role as there is: a mother who wreaks revenge on her philandering husband by murdering their children. If she has it in her, then this should be a breakthrough role for her. If not . . . let's hope it at least introduces the LA crowds to a great play. I saw it on Broadway with the marvelous Irish actress, Fiona Shaw, and cringed in abject horror as she staggered onstage carrying the inert, bloodied bodies of those two children. But as an acting tour de force, it was near the top. . . . Mrs. Warren Beatty has quite a challenge to meet.

A side note: while caught up in that scene as a dramatic play, I couldn't help wondering about the reality for those live child actors. What did they think this was about? And what kind of trauma might that have been for them, to even contemplate at that tender age that a mother could murder her children? I guess they could have been told -- look, we're going to put some red paint on you and pretend it's Halloween, and this nice lady is going to carry you on stage and you have to pretend to be asleep. But kids know more than we think about what's going on.

Ralph

Military brass speaks . . . now, finally.

The Miami Herald has an op-ed piece written by two retired generals. Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar. Some excerpts:

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics. . . .

The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. . . .

The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.

On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.

The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.

And the 09-24-09 issue of the New York Review of Books has a hard-hitting book review essay on the recently published book by General Richard Myers, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005. The review is titled "The Complicit General." In it Phillipe Sands is harshly critical of Myers for failing to include in his book a discussion of the dissent from the military leaders, as well as the State Department, as the decisions about torture were made and carried out.

Instead, Myers writes that "most everybody involved in the decisions" shared the view that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida. That may be technically true, since Secretary of State Colin Powell and the top military leaders' opinions were deliberately shut out of the decision-making process and therefore were not "involved in the decisions." But the very statement itself is highly deceptive and covers up what appears to be Myers' own cover-up -- that there was in fact serious dissent within the military command.

Sands also reports from an interview he conducted with Myers in 2002 that Myers mistakenly thought that the enhanced interrogation techniques in question were all in the Army Field Manual. When Sands informed him that none of them are, Myers was surprised and, according to Sands, "inadvertently reveals the full extent to which he has fallen into a fog."

That was in 2002, and yet, in his new book, Myers does not address this question and still vehemently maintains that he did not believe himself to have signed off on torture.

Myers was the military man who should have stood up to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yet obviously he did not. It seems questionable now that he even passed on to them the objections of the military leaders who reported to him and were charged with giving their assessments.

Not that it would have mattered to dick and rummy.

What irony. We put civilian government officials in charge of making the major decisions about war in order to put restraints on those whose job it is to fight. Yet in this situation, it was the military leaders (including Colin Powell, though he was then part of the civilian force) who warned against torture, and civilians -- without military any service time among them -- who insisted on it.

Ralph