I Blame the Independents

How stupid of me. I thought Massachusetts voters kept re-electing Senator Ted Kennedy time and time[...]

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Open Derision

[...]

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What has Obama done

The MSM has painted Obama as a thoughtful man. The Right wing has used this image to their[...]

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DSCC Goes Into CSI Mode

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is going to conduct a "forensic examination" of each 2010 Senate race to prevent a repeat of the Massachusetts debacle, Sen. Robert Menendez tells TPMDC.[...]

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The Real 'American Dilemma'

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / their flag to April's breeze unfurled, / here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard 'round the world."

I was born and brought up in Massachusetts and know people there who feel a small, proprietary stir in their hearts when they hear these lines by Emerson on the Minutemen's resisting a big government on April 19, 1775. The date was a school holiday in my youth, and - contrary to recent claims in what we laughingly call "news" media - Massachusetts Republicans led the celebrations: governors Christian Herter, John Volpe, Frank Sargeant, William Weld; senators Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

They were moderate Republicans, of a genus now extinct. Even Edward Brooke, the state's first black senator, was from the Party of Lincoln because Dems were mortgaged nationally to segregationists, something it took a repentant segregationist, Lyndon Johnson, to change.

Now Dems are mortgaged to corporate interests, and if it took a segregationist to flummox Jim Crow, maybe only a child of plutocracy like FDR can say of bankers, as he did in 1936, "They hate me - and I welcome their hatred." Barack Obama is no FDR, and his Dems are mortgaged to big Pharma and Wall Street. But the GOP is these interests' wholly owned subsidiary. Why don't our would-be Minutemen see this?

I took a crack at that question a few posts below this one, and Richard Parker, the Harvard economics historian and author of a great biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, responded this morning by writing me that the tsunami of anti-Democrat populism reflects a tremendous frustration wrapped in a typically American illusion.

Parker cites a Scott Brown voter, interviewed yesterday afternoon, who said he's passionately "for individual liberty" but wants "to get government's hands off Social Security and Medicare...." Like this voter, "a large segment of the population psychologically has personalized and privatized what is in fact public and thereby imagines government as the enemy of itself," Parker suggests.

As Massachusetts patriots, he adds, they have "an authentic hunger for liberty and democracy," coupled with "an almost Marxian recognition that ours is not in fact a democratic state, but rather the instrumental expression of powerful interests. Obama as a candidate awakened the dream that there might be more in this life, in this republic; Obama the president has let us watch once again as the dream is euthanized" by interests he dares not take on.

How can Obama take them on, when Scott Brown patriots have had no problem with special, powerful interests buying our Congressmen - as the Supreme Court seems about to let them do outright? Citizens in cradle of the American Revolution may feel rage at being dispossessed, but, like sunshine patriots, they're finding it easier to blame government for letting the interests write the bills than to blame the interests for holding the politicians hostage, under campaign-finance premises they seldom challenge.

The consequence of letting the interests write the bills, as Rober Scheer argues in TruthDig, is that we have a health-care bill that prompted a federal prosecutor to write me this morning, "I knew health care was dead the other day when I was talking to a fellow liberal colleague whose husband is active in local Dem politics, and it became obvious to both of us that we didn't know what was in the current plan, couldn't articulate how it would work, and weren't sure if we'd be personally helped or hurt by it."

So, congratulations, Congressional Democrats. And congratulations, Mr. President, for letting them do what they've done. But most of all, congratulations to us "liberals" and progressives for not speaking a language of liberty that's grounded and potent enough, in an American civic-republican way, to reach embattled patriots with the news that they're shooting in the wrong direction.

Glad though am that there's a black man in the Oval Office, this, as Richard Parker notes, is the new "American Dilemma."

Barack Obama - United States - Politics - Massachusetts - Democratic

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How to Talk to Angry Populists

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / their flag to April's breeze unfurled, / here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard 'round the world."

I was born and brought up in Massachusetts and know people there who feel a small, proprietary stir in their hearts when they hear these lines by Emerson on the Minutemen's resisting a big government on April 19, 1775. The date was a school holiday in my youth, and - contrary to recent claims in what we laughingly call "news" media - Massachusetts Republicans led the celebrations: governors Christian Herter, John Volpe, Frank Sargeant, William Weld; senators Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

They were moderate Republicans, of a genus now extinct. Even Edward Brooke, the state's first black senator, was from the Party of Lincoln because Dems were mortgaged nationally to segregationists, something it took a repentant segregationist, Lyndon Johnson, to change.

Now Dems are mortgaged to corporate interests, but Barack Obama is no Lyndon Johnson. If it took a segregationist to flummox Jim Crow, maybe only a child of plutocracy like FDR can say of bankers, as he did in 1936, "They hate me - and I welcome their hatred."

But while the Dems are mortgaged to big Pharma and Wall Street, the GOP is a wholly owned subsidiary. Why don't our would-be Minutemen see this?

I took a crack at that question a few posts below this one, and Richard Parker, the Harvard economics historian and author of a great biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, responded this morning by writing me that the tsunami of anti-Democrat populism reflects a tremendous frustration wrapped in a typically American illusion.

Parker cites a Scott Brown voter, interviewed yesterday afternoon, who said he's passionately "for individual liberty" but wants "to get government's hands off Social Security and Medicare...." Like this voter, "a large segment of the population psychologically has personalized and privatized what is in fact public and thereby imagines government as the enemy of itself," Parker suggests.

As good Massachusetts patriots, he adds, they have "an authentic hunger for liberty and democracy," coupled with "an almost Marxian recognition that ours is not in fact a democratic state, but rather the instrumental expression of powerful interests. Obama as a candidate awakened the dream that there might be more in this life, in this republic; Obama the president has let us watch once again as the dream is euthanized" by interests he dares not take on.

How can Obama take them on, when Scott Brown patriots have had no problem with special, powerful interests buying our Congressmen - as the Supreme Court seems about to let them do outright? Citizens in cradle of the American Revolution may feel rage at being dispossessed, but, like sunshine patriots, they're finding it easier to blame government for letting the interests write the bills than to blame the interests for holding the politicians hostage, under campaign-finance premises they seldom challenge.

The consequence of letting the interests write the bills, as Rober Scheer argues in TruthDig, is that we have a health-care bill that prompted a federal prosecutor to tell me this morning, "I knew health care was dead the other day when I was talking to a fellow liberal colleague whose husband is active in local Dem politics, and it became obvious to both of us that we didn't know what was in the current plan, couldn't articulate how it would work, and weren't sure if we'd be personally helped or hurt by it."

So, congratulations, Congressional Democrats. And congratulations, Mr. President, for letting them do what they've done. But most of all, congratulations to us "liberals" and progressives for not speaking a language of liberty that's grounded and potent enough, in an American civic-republican way, to reach embattled patriots with the news that they're shooting in the wrong direction.

Glad though am that there's a black man in the Oval Office, this, as Richard Parker notes, is the new American Dilemma.

Barack Obama - United States - Politics - Massachusetts - Democratic

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Deja Vu All Over Again

The only thing more discouraging than Teh Surge 2.0 is the finding that our defense contracting is still as screwed up as ever. In eight years, given all the money pouring into Iraq and the knowledge that it was not well overseen, the US government now repeating the same mistakes in Afghanistan.

In the report released Friday, auditors with the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed poor communication between U.S. officials and the two companies that are working on the majority of the projects.

While the U.S. Agency for International Development has relied on the companies, Louis Berger and Black & Veatch, for updates on projects, "that reporting has not always been timely or sufficient," the auditors said.

The companies also had trouble meeting deadlines for projects because of dangerous conditions.

In addition, Afghanistan began rebuilding its electrical grid without a concrete plan for how to approach such a complex effort, the auditors said.

In 2006, the USAID awarded the two U.S. companies a five-year, $1.4 billion joint contract to build many of the roads and energy projects that now are under way in Afghanistan.

Our government's defense accounting process is amazingly broken. Each service has its own accounting rules and procedures, and the auditing process isn't too effective. SecDef Gates is trying to improve the process, but it's like using band-aids to patch a dam that's leaking in multiple spots. We can't spend money on health or education, but there's no bottom to the defense bowl. Oh and Congress is completely unwilling to do anything about it, as long as the Repubs can throw up cuts in Medicare and Social Security instead.

Maybe President Obama can get around to this issue in his second term. No way he's going to touch it in the first term.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/jason-sigger/deja-vu-all-over-again

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Can health insurance reform still pass

In the wake of the Massachusetts Senate race, the question on everyone's mind is whether the health insurance reform bill -- in one form or another -- still pass?

Early speculation about rushing the House-Senate non-conference negotiations to a conclusion and passing that compromise before Scott Brown was certified and sworn in has been tamped down, leaving three basic options still available. That list may grow as people continue to brainstorm, but so far, these are the most likely paths:

1. The House can still choose to pass the Senate-amended version of H.R. 3950, unchanged. That would lock in what's become known as the Senate bill, which in a purely technical sense could be adopted by the House and sent to the President's desk without having to clear the Senate (and a filibuster) again. This option is disfavored in the House, however, because there are so many Members who have gone on record as saying they're opposed strongly enough to one provision or another to vote against it if it comes to the floor unchanged.

2. The House can bargain for the right to try to adopt further amendments to the Senate version in a separate bill, in exchange for agreeing to pass and lock in the Senate bill as a baseline measure. The speculation there is that the second bill would have to be passed under the budget reconciliation process, or else risk being blocked by a filibuster. Reconciliation involves an awful lot of procedural risks, but in theory, this option at least offers House, Senate and even White House negotiators the opportunity to address some of the issues their talks were close to resolving, and which are considered by many to be necessary in order to win votes for passing the bill adopted by the Senate.

3. Everyone can head back to the negotiating table and either see if there's a coalition of 60 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House that can be cobbled together for some amended form of the Senate bill. If not, they can either concede that it cannot be done and scrap it entirely, or see if there are any smaller, salvageable parts that might pass and make some sense standing on their own.

Option one probably doesn't need much more in the way of procedural explanation. In that case, the House votes on a rule allowing consideration of the Senate's amendment to H.R. 3590, and upon adoption of the rule proceeds to debate and vote on agreeing to the Senate amendment. If a majority will pass that rule and agree to the amendment, the deal is done and the Senate bill goes to the President's desk, Massachusetts notwithstanding.

Option three results either in scrapping the bill and doing nothing, or in the continuation of behind-the-scenes negotiations in search of something that gets a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. You'd need 60 in the Senate again, because once the House amended the Senate version of H.R. 3590 with its own new amendment, that amended bill would go back to the Senate. And though the motion to proceed to consideration of a House amendment is non-debatable (and therefore protected from the filibuster), the amendment itself gets no such protection. It's a bit complex, but generally understandable to anyone who understands why the Senate ever needed 60 votes for anything in the first place. The same rules generally obtain.

Option two, then, is the tricky one. First of all, it involves reconciliation, which is a headache in itself, but not impossible. Second, there's the trust issue. Single payer advocates, reproductive rights advocates and dozens of assorted others burned during this process by various promises to "fix it later" that ended up falling through will be justifiably wary of yet another "fix" promised for "later." So how might a deal be structured that does the job, but leaves some leverage in the hands of those who've been burned before? Here's Transportation Weekly publisher Jeff Davis, writing at TNR on the subject:

When it comes to enacting laws and then later amending those laws, it doesn’t matter in what order Congress passes bills. All that matters is the order in which the president signs those bills into law. As long as the president signs the health care bill 30 seconds before he signs the reconciliation bill, the latter can amend or repeal any provisions in the former. So the House and Senate could, in theory, vote on a conference report amending the Senate health care bill before the House actually has to take the tougher vote to accept the Senate bill.

No matter whether the House votes on reconciliation or the Senate bill first, the Speaker can ensure that the health care bill is signed into law before reconciliation. (The dirty little secret of Congress is that even if the House votes to pass the Senate health care bill tomorrow, the Speaker has unilateral power to hold that bill at her desk until January 3 of next year before sending it to the President and starting the 10-day Constitutional veto clock.)

Just a note about that last bit: if you read the Dec. 15, 2008 Congress Matters post about the enrollment process and the link it featured to the C-SPAN article on the subject, then you're already familiar with the "dirty little secret."

In effect, then, those Members unwilling to accept the Senate version of the bill without changes, but concerned that they won't get what they're promised in the way of a fix, can hold final passage of the Senate bill hostage until the fixes are taken care of. And they'd be crazy not to, if there's any serious consideration being given to heading down a "fix it later" path.

And here's an additional procedural tip e-mailed to me by Jeff. If House Members are still skittish about voting for the Senate bill straight-up, even after securing a fix through reconciliation, they can use a little procedural trick called a "self-executing rule" (see this CRS report [PDF] for more)-- or at least a self-executing provision in a rule -- to take care of business. At the conclusion of the reconciliation process, when the House and Senate have both passed their bills and have agreed on a conference report settling any differences, the House may opt to include in the rule it adopts to govern debate on that conference report a provision deeming the Senate amendment to H.R. 3590 agreed to by the House. That way, when the House adopts the rule to allow the reconciliation bill conference report to come to the floor, it also agrees to the Senate bill it's amending along the way, just moments before beginning debate on the fix, and without ever having a separate, stand-alone vote on the Senate bill they don't like.

Pretty neat, eh? Well, it's still a long and potentially rough road getting there. Do read all of what Jeff had to say about the perils of reconciliation and keep it in mind. It's no picnic, but even so, he does conclude by saying it wouldn't be unreasonable to think the process could be wrapped up by late February.

Will they do it? There's no telling. The Conventional Wisdom, of course, is that they won't. But such things become Conventional Wisdom in equal parts because the alternatives are as difficult to explain as they are to do. The politicians certainly don't relish the prospect of having to do them, but neither to most beat journalists relish the prospect of having to explain them. Together, they simply agree that though you might not like it if the politicians don't do it, it'll all be OK if they also make sure you don't understand how it might have been done if the journalists don't explain it.

But that's what gets me out of bed every morning. So too bad for them.

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reform-still-pass

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Voters Sent Several Messages Last Night But
Inside The Bubble They're Drawing Their Own Baseless Conclusions

Obama voters don't think he's fighting against the Bush policies hard enough
This morning I got e-mails from MoveOn, DFA, and the DPPP all pretty much saying the same thing, something we emphasized earlier in a quote from pollster Celinda Lake: "Scott Brown... became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it." People aren't stupid. They see that Obama's administration, like Bush's, is "delivering more for banks than Main Street." Needless the say, this is not how corporate media-- nor, of course, corporate Democrats-- are spinning the meaning of last night's election. As DFA pointed out, "conservative Democrats and Washington talking heads are claiming that the loss happened because Congress was "'too far to the left.'"

They're wrong again-- and we can prove it.

We had Research 2000 poll voters immediately after the Election ended: Even Scott Brown voters want Democrats to be bolder and they want healthcare reform that includes a public option.

You read that right. By a margin of three-to-two, former Obama voters who voted for Republican Scott Brown yesterday said the Senate healthcare bill "doesn't go far enough." Six-to-one Obama voters who stayed home agreed. And to top it off, 80% of all voters still want the choice of a public option in the bill.

MoveOn had much the same message, emphasizing that it was time for Washington to ??start truly fighting for working families. Pass real health care reform. Rein in Wall street. Take on the banks and special interests that stand in the way of change." Like many of us, they're demanding that Democratic Party insiders "stop siding with corporate interests and start fighting for working families." The poll the three organizations commissioned backs up these demands-- and warns Rahm Emanuel-ilk Democrats that it will be all over for them if they continue thwarting the will of the people. Emanuel asked-- rhetorically, of course; the only way he ever asks anything-- a few weeks ago where disenchanted progressives will go other than to keep voting for putrid corporate Democrats, Last night they answered him.

The poll was conducted immediately after the election last night of 1000 registered Massachusetts voters who voted for Obama in 2008. Half of the respondents voted in the MA special election for Republican candidate Scott Brown; half of the respondents did not vote at all. The poll definitively shows that voters who stayed home and voters who switched party allegiance share very common frustration and anger at an economy that continues to work better for Wall Street than Main Street. There's a real populist anger out there. Voters worry that Democrats in power have not done enough to combat the policies of the Bush era. Both sets of voters wanted stronger, more progressive action on health care reform, as well. In summary, the poll shows that the party who fights corporate interests-- especially on making the economy work for most Americans-- will win the confidence of the voters.

? 95% of voters said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote.

? 53% of Obama voters who voted for Brown and 56% of Obama voters who did not vote in the Massachusetts election said that Democrats enacting tighter restrictions on Wall Street would make them more likely to vote Democratic in the 2010 elections.

? 51% of voters who voted for Obama in 2008 but Brown in 2010 said that Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street.

? Nearly half (49%) of Obama voters who voted for Brown support the Senate health care bill or think it does not go far enough. Only 11% think the legislation goes too far.

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http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/01/voters-sent-several-messages-last-nig
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House Liberals To Pelosi: 'We cannot support the
Senate bill. Period.'

This is what happens when you don't involve people in the process.

Progressive Dems were ignored throughout the entire health care reform process, and now have no vested interest in seeing the bill pass. If anything, they have an interest in seeing it fail, so that the administration, and their own congressional leadership, learns that they matter and must be consulted, and their views included, in future legislation.

In fact, this is the House's version of the campaign Joe and I launched, Don't Ask Don't Give. Our campaign is focused on the Democrats' gay rights promises, but it could be about anything, or any Democrat. The basic point is: Don't come asking for favors after you tell us we don't matter.

From Greg Sargent at Plum Line:

In a private meeting in the Capitol just now, a dozen or more House liberals bluntly told Nancy Pelosi that there was no chance that they would vote to pass the Senate bill in its current form ? making it all but certain that House Dems won?t opt for this approach, a top House liberal tells me.

?We cannot support the Senate bill ? period,? is the message that liberals delivered to the Speaker, Dem Rep Raul Grijalva told me in an interview just now.

Some had hoped Pelosi would push liberals to get in line behind this approach, in hopes of expediting reform, but that didn?t appear to happen in this meeting. Pelosi mostly listened, Grijalva said, adding: ?We didn?t get any declarative statement from her.?

I suspect you're seeing a little "Don't Ask Don't Give" from Pelosi, directed at the White House, as well. If the President wants House liberals to get on board, he can come and convince them himself.

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i-we-cannot.html

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