The pundits speak

In yesterday's New York Times, both David Brooks and Paul Krugman weighed in on the fraught decision on the senate health care bill.

Brooks presented four reasons to support the bill and then six reasons to oppose it. Then he "confessed" that:

I flip-flop week to week and day to day. It's a guess. Does this put us on a path toward the real reform, or does it head us down a valley in which real reform will be less likely?

If I were a senator forced to vote today, I'd vote no. If you pass a health care bill without systemic incentives reform, you set up a political vortex in which the few good parts of the bill will get stripped out and the expensive and wasteful parts will be entrenched.

Defenders say we can't do real reform because the politics won't allow it. The truth is the reverse. Unless you get the fundamental incentives right, the politics will be terrible forever and ever.

On the same page, Paul Krugman acknowledges the anger of progressives and says: by all means, hang Lieberman in effigy, declare your disappointment in Obama, demand a change in senate rules.

But then meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

He says the good outweighs the bad; and he also claims that

. . . history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. . . . America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

And, he says, then we need to change the senate rules on the filibuster. . . . but

But that's for later. Right now, let's pass the bill that's on the table.

So there you have it. Perhaps the best conservative mind and the best liberal mind writing for the NYT both see both sides of the argument and come to different conclusions.

Now I don't feel so bad about flip-flopping from day to day myself.

Ralph

The public speaks

Rachel Weiner reports a poll on HuffingtonPost:

Conducted by Research 2000 for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and Democracy for America (DFA), the survey finds only 33 percent of likely voters favor a health care bill that does not include a public health insurance option and does not expand Medicare, but does require all Americans to get health insurance. . . .

Meanwhile, if the public option and Medicare buy-in are added, 58 percent of people support the idea. The number of Republican supporters drops to 22 percent, but independent support rises to 57 percent and Democratic support to a whopping 88 percent.

Listen up, Democratic senators ! What happened to the idea that politicians are poll-driven? It's been clear for a long time that the public supports a robust plan that includes some sort of government-sponsored alternative to private health insurance. But has that made a scintilla of difference in the senate?

I guess the checks from the insurance giants and BigPharma count more than the people's desire.

The dilemma now is whether a big grassroots push would make a difference at this stage (Richard would say yes) or whether in the current climate they simply are not going to listen.

How can you get anything passed when Repubs say no because it's too much, and progressive Dems say no because it's not enough? The combination, I fear, is unbeatable in the current dysfunctional system. Certainly without a push from the White House, I don't see how it can happen.

The choice seems to be between a bad bill (with some good features) and no bill at all.

Ralph

Send in the clowns

As readers know, I have often pointed out that comedians (most notably Stewart and Colbert) are more likely to confront politicians with the facts than the designated pundits and celebrity newspeople.

So maybe it's a good idea to "send in the clowns" as elected senators. At least Al Franken is making waves there -- as a serious lawmaker. He has shed his clown persona but seems to have retained the clown's penchant for speaking truth to power.

He introduced an amendment to the appropriations bill to prevent the government from working with contractors who deny victims of sexual assault the right to bring suit, and it looks like it may pass. This is a response to a terrible situation of contractors in Iraq who prevented women employees from suing for rape by other contract workers.

Now in a testy exchange with John Thune (R-SD) on the senate floor, Franken has called him out for a grossly distorted chart about when benefits of health care reform would take effect. Franken's effective line, which he came back to repeatedly, each time pointing out where Thune had his facts wrong:

"We have the right to our opinions. But we don't have the right to our own facts."

Pretty effective -- at least it seemed so from the video clip.

Ralph

Is it enough?

Richard says in his comment to my previous post:

The one sign of hope I see is that liberal opposition to the healthcare debacle has now coalesced. Virtually everyone on all the leftist blogs are now in agreement that it's a mess. Those who used to argue that a bad bill is better than none have disappeared. Maybe there's enough outrage that we can get the bill changed.

So what does the liberal opposition expect to accomplish that can attract 60 votes? Sure, you can stop this bill from passing by a couple of liberal senators voting against it, or threatening to. And then what?

I'm full of vehement defiance too -- HolyJoe does that to me -- but I'm trying to decide whether what we can actually get passed is better than nothing. And I believe that what we progressives want will get us nothing in this congress at this time. That has to wait for another day, another election, and changing the senate rules to get rid of minority rule.

Here's what President Obama had to say, and I'm trying to decide if it is better than no bill (via HuffingtonPost):

At the White House, the president said his congressional allies were "on the precipice" of a historic accomplishment that has eluded presidents and lawmakers for generations, adding the emerging bill includes "all the criteria that I laid out" in a speech to a joint session of Congress earlier in the year.

"It is deficit-neutral. It bends the cost curve. It covers 30 million Americans who don't have health insurance, and it has extraordinary insurance reforms in there to make sure that we're preventing abuse," he said.

It is a very bitter pill to swallow, made all the worse by the fact that HolyJoe Lieberman is having so much fun parading his vindictive narcissistic victory.

The bottom line: if this is the best we can get in this congress at this time, does the benefit to those who will now have health insurance coverage, who can keep it if they lose their jobs or get sick, and yes those who will live rather than die -- is it worth swallowing the bitter pill?

Ralph

If this is reform, let's kill it

I have again and again stretched to support Obama's positions as accepting the reality of what is possible, even while becoming more and more disappointed with the meager results.

I still had hope that the medical care reform would be better than what we have now.

Now I'm not sure it is. If, in fact, the news leaking out last night turns out to be true -- that on Obama's orders conveyed by Rahm Emmanuel to Harry Reid they were to cut a deal with Joe Lieberman in order to secure his vote -- and that HolyJoe won -- then I say "kill it." It will be worse than nothing.

We wanted single payer; they gave us public option; we lost public option and got a trigger; we lost even the trigger -- but, wait. It seemed like a good compromise: we got buy-in to Medicare for those over 55 and some other possibile non-profit plans for others too. So maybe it would be ok.

Now we've lost even that -- all to placate HolyJoe, Kewpie cheeks, Lieberman for his lousy vote.

As Greg Levine at FireDogLake, a progressive blog, wrote:

I say: Kill the bill.

I say this with a heavy heart. Failure to pass health care legislation, even terrible legislation, will be a great loss for the Obama administration and for Democrats in Congress. But passing a bill as bad as the Senate's eventual endpoint could be a bigger defeat for the Democratic majority we really want--one that takes progressive action on behalf of the voters.

Because, as I see it, a bill without the competitive force of a public option, or the opportunity for millions to buy into Medicare, without cheaper pharmaceuticals or meaningful controls on premiums, without bans on benefit caps or loophole-free safeguards against rescission, but with an individual mandate, will do nothing for the 30 million uninsured that advocates of the bill like to talk about helping--but it will do plenty for the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

In other words, everybody has to buy insurance, which is a huge boon for the insurance industry; but there are no controls, which is a huge boon for the insurance industry. Measures to control drug costs have been largely eliminated, but many more people will be going to the doctor, which means many more prescriptions, which is a huge boon for BigPharma.

Insurance and pharmaceutical companies are the beneficiaries of this bill, not the people.

There's still a glimmer of hope. Maybe they'll come up with some last minute thing; maybe Reid will decide to go the budget reconciliation route with a good plan and bypass the filibuster-60.

It's only a very slender thread of hope, and it's on life support, at best.

Ralph

Bush giveth and Bush taketh away

The one program that I had thought George W. Bush deserved some praise for -- his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa -- now appears to have been a case of giving with one hand and taking away with another. The program put billions of dollars into treatment for AIDS patients but prohibited the use of any of the money for family planning.

Thus, on a continent where less than one in five married women use birth control, there has been an explosion of births -- and of course many of the babies are born HIV positive, thus undermining the very program to combat AIDS.

According to McClatchy news service:

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility. . . .

Several decades ago, "the population explosion" was considered a time bomb. Then, important international programs to promote family planning in poor countries made significant strides in actually reducing birth rates -- until this was again reversed by conservative control of our government, whose anti-abortion fervor extended even to opposition to condoms -- aided and abetted by the Pope, who preached to the Ugandans that condoms actually increase the spread of AIDS.

So, in the interest of preventing abortions, no family planning = no condoms, which would have prevented much spread of HIV in addition to pregnancies.

Once again, the world can go to hell because of ignorance and prejudice. It is very sad and an abominable shame that the lives saved by AIDS drugs are off set by the increased number of babies born HIV positive because of the hand that took away what the other hand gave.

There seems no end to the harm that George W. Bush & Co. did to the world -- and all the result of a one-vote margin in the U. S. Supreme Court. For shame !!! Everlasting shame !!!!

Ralph

Arguing with myself

Last night, I wrote that we shouldn't lump all those who oppose same-sex marriage under the umbrella "homophobia." And, while that is valid when your concept of homophobia carries the implication of hostile and demeaning attitudes, it is a limited analysis.

From a deeper psychological perspective, "homophobia" is thought to arise from a fear about one's own identity. We denounce in others that which we cannot tolerate within ourselves -- a way of reassuring oneself that "I'm not like that." Our macho culture has one purpose: proving that men are not feminine and weak -- and it stems not from strength but from fear and insecurity about masculinity.

So, perhaps, those who accept gay people in every other way but marriage are doing something similar -- reassuring themselves about the insecurity we as a culture have about marriage. Missing is a focus on what marriage really is, what it means to two people and to a culture. Is it about the man-woman thing? Or is it about two people building a life together and taking care of each other?

If it's the former, then allowing same-sex couples to "be married" does indeed threaten the institution, because it's reason for being is challenged. But if it is about the latter, then there is no threat at all. And that latter is what is proving to be the case.

So they are right. It is a threat -- not to the institution of marriage but to the shallow definition. It will change that definition but not the institution. And that would be a good change -- to a more meaningful concept of two people building a life together and promising to take care of each other.

Ralph

Lose some, win some

Voters in California and Maine, and the legislature in New York, have voted down same-sex marriage.

Yet Houston, the 5th largest U.S. city, has just elected a lesbian as its mayor. And, I would add, Atlanta had a lesbian City Council president more than 10 years ago in Kathy Woollard, who then went on to come in second in her race for mayor. She probably would have been elected if she had been African-American, because the dirt thrown at her was that she was not black enough in this black-majority city, not that she was lesbian.

Meanwhile, the Victory Fund which promotes the election of LGBT candidates, saw the election of 54 of the 79 openly gay candidates it supported in 2009. And the Episcopal Church has just elected its second gay bishop, a lesbian.

What do I conclude from this? Homophobia is not dead, but it's growing weaker at the ballot box and in the pulpit; but it's still quite strong at the marriage altar.

The trouble is that we're not asking that religious marriage be mandated, only civil marriage with all the rights and responsibilities of legal contract that heterosexuals have.

In the wonderful anecdote told in the debate in the New York senate by a legislator who supported the same-sex marriage bill, she was stopped at a traffic light that morning, when a bicyclist stopped next to her and put his head in her car window. Seeing her NY State Senate decal, he wanted to know if she was going to vote for the bill. When she said she was, he asked why on earth she would do that. To which she replied: "Because you and I, who have just met and exchanged only a few words, could go down to City Hall right now and get a marriage license. Do you really think that you and I are ready to get married? And yet my friends who have been together in a committed relationship for 16 years cannot." He said, "I see your point." That is a very good, rational argument; but it didn't sway her colleagues.

I'm not sure it's accurate to call the opposition to same-sex marriage 'homophobia.' Some of it undoubtedly is, but I'm willing to acknowledge that many people oppose it who are 100% supportive of gays and lesbians in every other way, including as teachers of young children -- perhaps the other most sensitive area.

Is that homophobia? Or is it really a fear that a cherished institution is being changed -- as they say it is? Not that Adam and Steve getting married will actually change John and Mary's marriage (we trivialize the argument when we reduce it to that); but that somehow the meaning of "marriage" will change. We can argue the facts that, in states and other countries that have adopted gay marriage, there are no measurable changes in other people's marriages or in the institution itself. But this opposition is not measurable by statistics but rather by feelings.

Of course opposition based on feelings is not an argument that should stand up in a court challenge. But I think we make a mistake when we lump everyone who opposes gay marriage in the same category of homophobia and try to argue facts with them. This opposition isn't rational. We win a rational debate; we lose when people vote with their emotions. Perhaps that's why we're making more progress in courts than in legislatures, and more progress in legislatures than at the ballot box.

Ralph