Futile Hopes Department

Click on image to view complete cartoon.

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http://lylelahey.blogspot.com/2009/07/futile-hopes-department.html

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The Possibility of an Obama-Chavez Understanding

The media is full of speculation about President Obama's deft "deflection" against President Hugo Chavez' maneuvering and finger-pointing in the Honduras crisis. But another narrative is possible, of an undisclosed new diplomatic collaboration replacing the constant tensions and CIA foreknowledge of the brief 2002 coup against the Venezuelan leader.

It is too early to define a new era, but something profoundly new began developing between Obama and Chavez at the hemispheric conference in April in Trinidad.

According to eyewitness sources, under the apparently blind eye of the global media, the two leaders had lengthy conversations. The media covered the friendly photo of the initial handshake between the two leaders, then made much ado about an apparently-impertinent Chavez handing Obama a book in Spanish by Eduardo Galleano.

What has not been reported is that Obama, leaving his advisers behind, held lengthy private conversations with Chavez where only an interpreter was present.

It is not known what occurred in the secret talks. But sources in Caracas say that Chavez has become fascinated with Obama, seeking to understand the new US president and the forces around him, partly with advice from Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Honduran crisis has been mounting for weeks. According to the New York Times', Chavez "had his playbook ready", planning to blame the CIA. But Obama, according to the Times' headlines, "deflected" the Venezuelan president by coming out strongly against the coup.

The real story is that a gradual rapprochement - not an alliance but a dialogue - is happening between the US and Venezuela, and it began in Trinidad, was pushed by Latin American leaders and welcomed by those like Obama, who prefer diplomacy over a return to US Cold War isolation.

It was no accident that Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, returned to Washington in recent days after his expulsion several months ago.

The rapprochement, if it holds, would seem to be welcome news. The fact that is has occurred so silently is evidence that peace has its enemies.

Sponsored Topics: Honduras - Barack Obama - Hugo Chávez - Venezuela - United States

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Framing the Public Option debate: It's oversight,
baby!

Jacob Hacker is an exceptional mind and hits all the right notes when he discusses health care reform and the public option. This piece is a must-read, but he doesn't stop there.

Check out what he says in the TNR on page two of his article.

This is a not a radical idea. In many areas of American commerce, private and government programs comfortably co-exist. FHA insured loans and non-FHA loans, Social Security and private pensions, public and private universities--all have long thrived side by side. Each side of the divide has strengths and weaknesses, but in every case the public sector is providing something the private sector cannot: A backup that's there if and when you need it; a benchmark for private providers; and a backstop to make sure costs don't spin out of control. Just as it is comforting to have Social Security in case your 401(k) evaporates or an FHA loan in case your credit score tanks, a new public plan provides an added level of protection against the vicissitudes of an unaccountable insurance market.

A public plan is about competition as well as choice. Even on a level playing field, the public plan will create discipline for private insurers that regulations alone simply cannot. Regulations require extensive monitoring and vigilance--and, as we know from careful study and long experience, private insurers will try to get around these rules. Having a tough public-spirited competitor means that the regulations do not have to do more work than can be expected of even the most nimble and powerful regulator, much less real-world regulators constantly subject to industry pressure, ideological attacks, and budgetary constraints. So the public plan is about more than choice and competition.

It is also about regulatory realism and restraint of the kind that, in other contexts, conservatives generally espouse. The goal of the public plan isn't to eliminate private insurance, or put government in charge of American medicine, or any of the other frightening futures that critics have painted. The goal is to create accountability for the public and private sectors alike while ensuring all Americans have affordable quality care. Sure, there will be tensions and difficult questions to resolve. But the alternative, as we've seen, would be far worse.

The whole article is a must-read. Imagine that, the public option would also serve as a watchdog against the entire health-care industry. If the public option were worthless, there wouldn't be a hissy-fit going on among conservatives and groups like the AMA. Jacob uses the very smart framing that the public option provides a little "law and order," and I thought conservatives were into being tough guys, no?

Don't forget about Blue America's push against Blanche Lincoln because of her refusal to support a public option. UPDATE: We've raised almost 22,000 so far so if you want to get into the action, pick the ad you want to run in Arkansas and vote for it.

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Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/framing-public-option-debate-its-oversi

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We know OK's loony Jim Inhofe will still be in
the Senate come the 112th Congress, but how about PA's Arlen Specter and NY's Kirsten Gillibrand

?I didn?t mean to be disrespectful. I don?t know the guy, but ? for a living he is a clown.?
-- Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe
by Ken

(1) WHEN SEN. JIM INHOFE OPENS HIS MOUTH, STAND BACK!

Under closer questioning, the Tulsa World's Jim Myers reports, Senator Inhofe acknowledged that he was referring to Minnesota's then-not-yet senator-elect, Al Franken when he said, in connection with the likely outcome of the Minnesota Senate race, "I?ll tell you what a lot of people are thinking, and that is it looks like things are going to be over and we are going to get the clown from Minnesota."

Periodically -- in periods that are far too frequent for the country's mental as well as political health -- the senator, who is Congress's leading Christian-crazy climate-change denier and, in general, sworn foe of rational scientific inquiry, opens his mouth and we are treated to the effluvia thrown off by the vortex of his dementia.

Since Oklahoma has the distinction of being represented by two U.S. senators who are certifiably insane, let's make it clear here that we're not talking about Doctortom Coburn, the wingnut loon who specializes in unilaterally stopping the Senate from advancing on any issue that catches in his vestigial brain, and delights in being called "Dr. No." Senator Inhofe is the raving wingnut loon -- OK, no difference so far -- who believes that protection of the environment is not only a scam but is actually anti-Christian because real Christians understand that we only need the earth until the imminent Rapture. This is, by the way, the man who, in one of life's most savage ironies, was until the Democrats regained control of the Senate chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Now he's merely the ranking minority member.

Senator Inhofe made his original crack about his soon-to-be Senate colleague in connection with his forecast that, despite the imminent seating of the clown, the climate-change bill just passed by the House is "dead in the water" on arrival in the Senate. But he also had to deal with the blowback from some of his other recent pronouncements. (This is itself a climate change of sorts. It used to be that he was never asked to answer for the imbecilities he spews.)

Specifically, he has had to back down from his much-publicized accusation that the EPA had suppressed a global-warming-debunking report, by one of his GW-denier cronies. Pumped up by his friends the Fox Noise liars, he was insisting that the matter warranted criminal investigation. In his Tuesday Tulsa World interview, " he said he has "no way of knowing" whether any wrongdoing was committed, and "also conceded that his own investigation into the matter has not uncovered anything that would warrant a criminal investigation."

(2) LOOKS LIKE SPECTER AND GILLIBRAND WILL
DEFINITELY (?) FACE PRIMARY CHALLENGES

As we all know, White House political operatives have been in cahoots with political heavyweights in both Pennsylvania, notably Gov. Ed Rendell, and New York, notably senior Sen. Chuck Schumer, to prevent forestall divisive and expensive primary challenges to freshly minted "Democratic" Sen. Arlen Specter and merely appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.  As Howie has been reporting, in both states this political "fix" has aroused a good deal of anger, both for the anti-democratic ("small d") high-handedness of the maneuvering and for the distinctly conservative cast of the beneficiaries, and there have been serious rumblings of "nevertheless" challenges.

In PENNSYLVANIA, where admiral-turned-congressman Joe Sestak has been sending fairly consistent signals that he's gearing up for such a race, Steve McConnell reported yesterday on the Wayne Independent's website:

In an interview with The Wayne Independent Wednesday morning, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa.,confirmed his intention to run against Specter, a long-time Republican who switched to the Democratic party earlier this year.
?I am going to get into the race against Arlen Specter ... for senator,? said Sestak in his first media interview as part of a three-week tour through all of the Commonwealth?s 67 counties.

Wayne County was his first stop where he met with local Democrats prior to his interview with The Wayne Independent.

Meanwhile in NEW YORK, despite the virtual lockdown on normally available political resources engineered by Senator Schumer and his White House coconspirators, Rep. Carolyn Maloney is reportedly mere days away from announcing formally that she will mount a Democratic primary challenge to Kirsten Gillibrand, appointed by Gov. David Paterson to replace now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Senate until next year's special election.

The current hubbub concerns what was being described as an apparent endorsement of Maloney by former President Bill Clinton, who is scheduled to appear at a July 20 fund-raiser for the congresswoman. However, this doesn't appear to be the case. Rather, it appears that the former president is doing a Clinton-family "thank you" tour, repaying pols who supported Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, which the former candidate herself is prevented from doing by her current position.
Both challenges appear doomed, but the more important seems to me the Pennsylvania one. There is also a case to be made, and I've seen it made by one of the smartest people I know, that the New York challenge is going to cut seriously into the money and attention available for the Sestak challenge in Pennsylvania, even as the politics of a challnger to her left (though not very far to her left) drive Senator Gillibrand back toward the right (she has been seriously more liberal in her time in the Senate than she was in the House), both in the campaign and in the Senate.
This prognosticator predicts that people "on all sides" will live to regret this extremely expensive race. I would only disagree that people on all sides will be deeply unhappy but won't know what hit them, and will instead resort to the usual mutual finger-pointing.#

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http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/07/we-know-oks-loony-jim-inhofe-will-sti
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The falsest analogy I ever did see

I swear to god - if I read one more libertarian 'I got mine and fuck you' nut job make one more false analogy about health care and market forces, I swear I will throw something. - preferably the idiot making the false analogy off the top of the Liberty Memorial.  That was my reaction yesterday when I read an editorial by someone named George Newman in the Wall Street Journal. It was just so staggeringly stupid and wrong I had to close the tab and go do something else for a while.  

When the word 'parsing' is in the title, and you know it was written by a wingnut, two things are a given.  First, if you take meds for hypertension, take them fifteen minutes before you start to read. And second, get all liquids away from your computer, because the parsing is going to be unintentionally funny.

The first statement he parses is "The American people overwhelmingly favor reform."

This he dismisses with a glib golly gee, we would all be happier if someone else paid their medical bills, so of course they say yes.

Hey, dumbass - the reason people buy insurance is because they want someone else to pay their bills and they get pissed off when the insurance companies renege on their end of the bargain.  

He then dismisses concerns with spiraling costs as how things ought to be, and anyone who doesn't get that is just too absurd for him to be bothered with engaging, because quality healthcare is discretionary spending.  

Then he goes on to compare education and healthcare, and whines that liberals love spending money on education but healtcare spending must be stopped at any cost - as if they were the same thing - and totally ignores that public schools have not destroyed private education in this country.  

The next point he parses the "45 million uninsured" estimate.  He doesn't think that many people are uninsured.  I think the number is a lot higher - and if you throw in the 'underinsured' you probably have close to 100,000,000 who lack adequate healthcare access.

Then he pretends that if all those people are uninsured (which he doubts) then how can we get away with saying we pay for them anyway, he just can't connect the two in a coherent, cohesive manner..."So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction."  

Sigh. Uninsured people do not have access to clinics and preventive care.  There is no equivalent to EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) that mandates providers render preventive care, so patients without insurance languish and suffer until they are sick enough to go to the ER, where the average visit is over a thousand dollars, and if they are sick enough to be admitted, the bill is going to run into the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These bills, for the most part, get written off as charity care, but the doors have to stay open, and that means income has to match outflow.  So that charity care gets passed on to the insured in the form of higher bills which lead to increased premiums.  

Only the willfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest would even try that silly false argument.  

But he saves his really stupid analogies for the end, when he compares healthcare access to grocery shopping when he attempts to parse the reformist argument "We need a public plan to keep the private plans honest."

I'm just going to quote him directly, because it is pure comedy gold how wrong he gets this one:

The 1,500 or so private plans don't produce enough competition? Making it 1,501 will do the trick? But then why stop there? Eating is even more important than health care, so shouldn't we have government-run supermarkets "to keep the private ones honest"? After all, supermarkets clearly put profits ahead of feeding people. And we can't run around naked, so we should have government-run clothing stores to keep the private ones honest. And shelter is just as important, so we should start public housing to keep private builders honest. Oops, we already have that. And that is exactly the point. Think of everything you know about public housing, the image the term conjures up in your mind. If you like public housing you will love public health care.

Talk about having no grasp of the model!  An honest, good-faith argument would take into consideration all the government subsidies to the farmers that keep the prices of the commodities on the shelf low and affordable.  And an honest commentary would acknowledge that the supermarket - but not the insurance company - is subject to antitrust laws.  

Now lets get to the real-world dismissal of his false analogy, and believe me, analogies just don't get any falser than the one he draws between health care services and grocery shopping.  When you go to the grocery story, you put food in your cart and you go to the checkout where you pay for it.  When a consumer pays their health insurance premium, they are prepaying for a service they might need at some point in the future.  

The grocery and clothing stores have a vested interest in selling me a tangible product and providing me a decent value and quality for my money so I will keep coming back, because there are grocery and clothing stores all over town, and I don't have to make all my selections for an entire year within a 30 day period. An insurance company, on the other hand, has you locked in at least until open enrollment comes back around on the HR calendar, and you can't switch until then, and then you will only have one, maybe two other choices.  

But there is more stupid to unpack here - those stores selling me commodities like food and clothing exist to provide me with things I need and in exchange they make a profit.  Insurance companies, on the other hand, exist to maximize profit for their shareholders and they do so by denying services to people who need them.  

And yes, we do need to keep them honest.  What insurance companies routinely do is akin to a customer going to the grocery store and paying for a cart full of groceries and then as you are leaving the store someone stops you and tells you that your purchase has been denied, they made a phone call and you don't need those groceries so they will be keeping them and no, you do not get your money back.  That would be theft and I would sure as hell get the government involved, and so would you, and so would this Newman joker the WSJ editorial page scared up to post talking points and face the wrath and snark of a couple of thousand pissed off bloggers.  


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McCain-Feingold: Together again, blocking Obama
FEC nominee

That great duo from early in the decade is back together again, this time blocking one of President Obama's nominees:

Campaign finance mavens John McCain , R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold , D-Wis., are joining forces once again – this time to block President Obama’s nomination of labor lawyer John J. Sullivan to the Federal Election Commission.

If confirmed by the Senate, Sullivan would fill one of three Democratic seats on the evenly divided FEC, taking over from Democrat Ellen Weintraub, who continues to sit on the commission even though her term expired on April 30, 2007.

But the two senators, who succeeded in getting landmark campaign finance legislation enacted in 2002, have indicated that they will lift the hold only if Obama picks two more nominees to replace FEC Chairman Steven T. Walther, a Democrat, and commissioner Donald F. McGahn II, a Republican, whose terms ran out on May 1.

“Until the White House nominates replacements for the two other commissioners whose terms have expired, we cannot consent to Mr. Sullivan’s confirmation,” McCain and Feingold said in a joint statement. “The FEC is currently mired in anti-enforcement gridlock; the president must nominate new commissioners with a demonstrated commitment to the existence and enforcement of the campaign finance laws.”
...
Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Obama has done nothing to live up to those promises, and praised the move by McCain and Feingold. Sloan said their hold likely has little to do with Sullivan. Rather, she said, the senators are “trying to force the president’s hand” on overhauling the agency and replacing McGahn, whom she called a force for campaign finance deregulation.

“I’m really glad they did it. The FEC is a disaster, it couldn’t be worse,” Sloan said. “[Obama] is letting Don McGahn run the place into the ground.” -CQ Politics

While it goes against our nature to not abuse any Senator placing holds on Obama nominations, getting McGahn off of the FEC as quickly as possible seems like a noble effort.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.Demconwatchblog.com/diary/1906/mccainfeingold-together-again-blocking-
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Stewart smacks down Sheuer and a call to KO for a
"Special Comment"

Crossposted at Daily Kos " The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. "      If this was said by a Democrat, Progressive or Liberal, or even an[...]

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No More Excuses

I often compare politicians to weathervanes, with political pressures of various kinds and degrees as the winds that turn them. But there is an interesting phenomenon to be observed with our national weathervanes. They only seem to turn to the right.[...]

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Obama Won't Rule Out Indefinite Detention for
Terror Suspects

President Obama will not rule out detaining terror suspects indefinitely, although he says it "gives me huge pause."

Obama, while saying he isn't comfortable using executive orders to detain prisoners, wouldn't rule it out during an interview with The Associated Press.

But he also said there are some detainees who don't fall neatly into existing categories for criminal prosecution in the United States or under international law. He said dealing with them is going to be one of the biggest challenges of his administration.



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Dana Milbank's employer, the Washington Post,
planned "Salons" (at $25,000 a pop) offering access to high-level officials

The Washington Post has completely jumped the shark and lost any shred of credibility. The Post planned to sell access. DC access. Inside access. Remember how sanctimonious Dana Milbank was last week when Nico Pitney asked a question at the Obama press conference? Remember how Milbank disparaged the idea that any administration would work in synch with the media? On CNN's Reliable Sources, Milbank said, "What I have never done in my life, Howie, is worked in collusion with an administration..." Hmmm. But, this was the latest from Milbank's Washington Post, as reported by Politico this morning:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and ? at first ? even the paper?s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its ?health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events ? a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.

The offer ? which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters ? was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

That sounds like working in collusion with an administration to me.

Early this afternoon, the Post canceled the Salons. It was all just a big mistake.

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