Yep, Pretty Much

I keep hearing various explanations of how and why House Dems and the folks at the White House aren't deciding to scrap health care and do nothing. But it all seems to add up to they're in the process of scrapping the health care bill and doing nothing.[...]

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Lemmings Have Nothing On Democrats

So, in addition to screwing up healthcare and escalating in Afghanistan, it seems that Obama is set[...]

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Today's the Birthday of My Missing Bi-polar Older
Brother, "Danny"

I was translating in Estelí, Nicaragua in 1985 when my mother called to tell me that my older brother was having serious troubles, although she could not (or would not) describe these troubles over the telephone. I came home to find a monstrous problem that I had not created, could never control and could never cure.

My brother was highly creative, taking part as a child in a special program for future oceanographers; learning to play flute, upright bass and sousaphone. He wrote prose and studied Latin, proposing to translate the entire "Les Miserables" from English to Latin as his final term project in Junior High School. I remember telling that seemed like too much, but no one could convince him.

Like the main character in the movie, "The Soloist," music was the center of Danny's activities. He could always be heard training on a classical piece or running up and down the scales. Sometime in his late adolescence he stopped playing all instruments and he refused to explain to me why. Meanwhile his ideas became more grandiose; in the age of the Thriller video, Danny proposed to start a band with twenty somersaulting adolescent musicians, a traveling "We Are the World" concert that would change the world for the better.

Because our political ideas and grandiose ideas often coincided, he often helped my political projects to succeed, such as starting Greater New Bedford (MA) Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers and Social Workers Against Apartheid, all within two weeks, and obtaining their money and their authorizing signatures for a half-page ad in the local newspaper announcing the names of all of the prominent local professionals opposing apartheid. Dan had immense energy and a sincere desire and determination to manifest that energy in action.

Dan became more eccentric, still, as he went away to college. He was not visibly overweight, but when I visited him there in his first year, I discovered that he was spending his time building a virtual locker room in which he planned to keep all of his food under lock and key, to prevent himself from eating anything before its time had come. Only my brother had the keys to these many locks and compartments that would overcome and defeat his desire to eat.

It was just one of a series of strange behaviors. My brother joined the Church of Scientology and became convinced that all of his mental dilemmas were due to misunderstandings of common words. He began searching for the exact meaning(s) of these words in dictionaries, convinced that he would eventually clarify all of his misunderstandings.

Although Dan was unemployed, he applied for an American Express card and used it to buy an expensive new saxophone for a family member who had never played saxophone.

Then, Danny became very scary. His manias were becoming psychotic breaks with reality. Once, after, I had moved away from mother's house, my mother told me that Dan had asked her to bury all of the knives from the house in the backyard, because he was afraid he might hurt someone. Only my brother could understand why burying the knives would help, while the hammers and crowbars and his bare hands didn't pose a similar danger. Surely his expressed fears were somehow related to his inner dialogue.

He began to sexually assault women. Once, before he was first diagnosed, and as my mother and I were practically physically compelling him to walk into a psychiatric outpatient clinic, he reached out and fondled the breast of a stranger, a woman walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. As he did so, he said "Woo, hoo, hoo" or something of the sort!

We apologized to the thirty-ish woman, knowing that Dan had just committed a punishable criminal act (unless he didn't understand the wrongfulness of his act and was unable to control his behavior). We told ourselves, and the woman, that he was immediately on his way for psychiatric help.

Later, he sexually assaulted a minor female member of our family in a way so unspeakable that no one would describe to me precisely what he had done.

When we finally succeed in dragging Danny into the psychiatrist's office, the doctor told us something that none of us was willing to accept: that my older brother had become manic depressive and only daily medication and regular visits to a psychiatrist could help him to improve. There was no cure for the disease he had.

'There must be another answer,' I told myself, but I had no idea what that answer might be. Tea leaves? Exorcism? A long camping trip?

In fact, Dan was bipolar and refused to take the medicine that even I came to believe was absolutely necessary because his un-medicated behavior was utterly intolerable. I was afraid of him and what he might do next. After I had moved away from home, I heard rumors of his behavior: I was told that Danny went to New York, stole a car, and then drove up beside a police car, smiled broadly and announced that he was driving a stolen car. I was told he went to a marina and took off with a boat, for no particular reason other than the simple fact that the idea had occurred to him and seemed too alluring to ignore.

The medications prescribed for Danny were unacceptable to him. Lythium and other alternatives drove away his flights of mental fancy, while he loved to fly as few people can. Sometimes, he thought of his mania as a gift that others couldn't experience. We wanted to extinguish his "gift" with medication, while Dan wanted to continue to experience it, even at the eventual cost of his family his freedom, and maybe his life. How long can a large Black man flaunt the laws and most basic regulations of social behavior and restraint without becoming to a long prison sentence or becoming victim to a police extra-judicial, pre-trial execution?

My mother was dedicated to my brother, going with him through his manic and depressive states, seeing behavior in which that no mother raises her child to engage.

I was in therapy for my own issues, and I asked my therapist how I could remain close to Dan while maintaining a semblance of sanity in my own life. The truth was, I was very afraid of him. My therapist said, "If you don't like roller-coasters than don't ride them."

I told Dan that although I couldn't compel him to take his medicine I would no longer be around him while he was not taking medication. My mother told me later that this had hurt Danny deeply, because we had always been close friends. We had shared many eccentric and grandiose moments of hilarity, laughing at how the "poor dumb slobs" of the world went about their daily routines. We knew what distinguished us from the "poor dumb slobs" was that we would have no idea how to follow their daily routines, their predictable career paths, even if we had tried.

Dan began writing novels under the pseudonym "F.Q. Dutchman." I never read one of his novels because he never invited me to do so. I did read a short story in which an immensely fat and oblivious man accidentally sat on a child and squished him to death, then finding himself swimming in a deep sense of guilt that he could never expunge.

I remember thinking that the immensely fat person in the story was my brother, in his own distorted perception. My brother felt immensely guilty, bad and wrong, which might simply have been a symptom of the depressive part of his bipolar disorder.

Around 1990, around the time when I banished Dan from my life, he disappeared. He said he was going to Maine and then told friends in Maine that he was going to Florida, but there was no evidence that he ever arrived there. He had stopped withdrawing his monthly pension from his bank account.

My mother sought the help of a private investigator who could find no evidence that my brother had used his Social Security Number to access medical treatment; no evidence of arrest or internment, and finally no evidence that he was alive at all.

Today marks the 50th birthday of my older brother "Dan," who disappeared around 1990, in the midst of a flight of fancy. The very last information I have about Dan comes from the Internet: I've discovered at Google that Dan filed an application for copywrite in 1989, for a documentary script called, "The Best Thing," by

"Daniel L. Holland, whose pseud. is F. Q. Dutchman."

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Today's the 50th Birthday of My Missing Bi-polar
Older Brother, "Danny"

I was translating in Estelí, Nicaragua in 1985 when my mother called to tell me that my older brother was having serious troubles, although she could not (or would not) describe these troubles over the telephone. I came home to find a monstrous problem that I had not created, could never control and could never cure.

My brother was highly creative, taking part as a child in a special program for future oceanographers; learning to play flute, upright bass and sousaphone. He wrote prose and studied Latin, proposing to translate the entire "Les Miserables" from English to Latin as his final term project in Junior High School. I remember telling that seemed like too much, but no one could convince him.

Like the main character in the movie, "The Soloist," music was the center of Danny's activities. He could always be heard training on a classical piece or running up and down the scales. Sometime in his late adolescence he stopped playing all instruments and he refused to explain to me why. Meanwhile his ideas became more grandiose; in the age of the Thriller video, Danny proposed to start a band with twenty somersaulting adolescent musicians, a traveling "We Are the World" concert that would change the world for the better.

Because our political ideas and grandiose ideas often coincided, he often helped my political projects to succeed, such as starting Greater New Bedford (MA) Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers and Social Workers Against Apartheid, all within two weeks, and obtaining their money and their authorizing signatures for a half-page ad in the local newspaper announcing the names of all of the prominent local professionals opposing apartheid. Dan had immense energy and a sincere desire and determination to manifest that energy in action.

Dan became more eccentric, still, as he went away to college. He was not visibly overweight, but when I visited him there in his first year, I discovered that he was spending his time building a virtual locker room in which he planned to keep all of his food under lock and key, to prevent himself from eating anything before its time had come. Only my brother had the keys to these many locks and compartments that would overcome and defeat his desire to eat.

It was just one of a series of strange behaviors. My brother joined the Church of Scientology and became convinced that all of his mental dilemmas were due to misunderstandings of common words. He began searching for the exact meaning(s) of these words in dictionaries, convinced that he would eventually clarify all of his misunderstandings.

Although Dan was unemployed, he applied for an American Express card and used it to buy an expensive new saxophone for a family member who had never played saxophone.

Then, Danny became very scary. His manias were becoming psychotic breaks with reality. Once, after, I had moved away from mother's house, my mother told me that Dan had asked her to bury all of the knives from the house in the backyard, because he was afraid he might hurt someone. Only my brother could understand why burying the knives would help, while the hammers and crowbars and his bare hands didn't pose a similar danger. Surely his expressed fears were somehow related to his inner dialogue.

He began to sexually assault women. Once, before he was first diagnosed, and as my mother and I were practically physically compelling him to walk into a psychiatric outpatient clinic, he reached out and fondled the breast of a stranger, a woman walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. As he did so, he said "Woo, hoo, hoo" or something of the sort!

We apologized to the thirty-ish woman, knowing that Dan had just committed a punishable criminal act (unless he didn't understand the wrongfulness of his act and was unable to control his behavior). We told ourselves, and the woman, that he was immediately on his way for psychiatric help.

Later, he sexually assaulted a minor female member of our family in a way so unspeakable that no one would describe to me precisely what he had done.

When we finally succeed in dragging Danny into the psychiatrist's office, the doctor told us something that none of us was willing to accept: that my older brother had become manic depressive and only daily medication and regular visits to a psychiatrist could help him to improve. There was no cure for the disease he had.

'There must be another answer,' I told myself, but I had no idea what that answer might be. Tea leaves? Exorcism? A long camping trip?

In fact, Dan was bipolar and refused to take the medicine that even I came to believe was absolutely necessary because his un-medicated behavior was utterly intolerable. I was afraid of him and what he might do next. After I had moved away from home, I heard rumors of his behavior: I was told that Danny went to New York, stole a car, and then drove up beside a police car, smiled broadly and announced that he was driving a stolen car. I was told he went to a marina and took off with a boat, for no particular reason other than the simple fact that the idea had occurred to him and seemed too alluring to ignore.

The medications prescribed for Danny were unacceptable to him. Lythium and other alternatives drove away his flights of mental fancy, while he loved to fly as few people can. Sometimes, he thought of his mania as a gift that others couldn't experience. We wanted to extinguish his "gift" with medication, while Dan wanted to continue to experience it, even at the eventual cost of his family his freedom, and maybe his life. How long can a large Black man flaunt the laws and most basic regulations of social behavior and restraint without becoming to a long prison sentence or becoming victim to a police extra-judicial, pre-trial execution?

My mother was dedicated to my brother, going with him through his manic and depressive states, seeing behavior in which that no mother raises her child to engage.

I was in therapy for my own issues, and I asked my therapist how I could remain close to Dan while maintaining a semblance of sanity in my own life. The truth was, I was very afraid of him. My therapist said, "If you don't like roller-coasters than don't ride them."

I told Dan that although I couldn't compel him to take his medicine I would no longer be around him while he was not taking medication. My mother told me later that this had hurt Danny deeply, because we had always been close friends. We had shared many eccentric and grandiose moments of hilarity, laughing at how the "poor dumb slobs" of the world went about their daily routines. We knew what distinguished us from the "poor dumb slobs" was that we would have no idea how to follow their daily routines, their predictable career paths, even if we had tried.

Dan began writing novels under the pseudonym "F.Q. Dutchman." I never read one of his novels because he never invited me to do so. I did read a short story in which an immensely fat and oblivious man accidentally sat on a child and squished him to death, then finding himself swimming in a deep sense of guilt that he could never expunge.

I remember thinking that the immensely fat person in the story was my brother, in his own distorted perception. My brother felt immensely guilty, bad and wrong, which might simply have been a symptom of the depressive part of his bipolar disorder.

Around 1990, around the time when I banished Dan from my life, he disappeared. He said he was going to Maine and then told friends in Maine that he was going to Florida, but there was no evidence that he ever arrived there. He had stopped withdrawing his monthly pension from his bank account.

My mother sought the help of a private investigator who could find no evidence that my brother had used his Social Security Number to access medical treatment; no evidence of arrest or internment, and finally no evidence that he was alive at all.

Today marks the 50th birthday of my older brother "Dan," who disappeared around 1990, in the midst of a flight of fancy. The very last information I have about Dan comes from the Internet: I've discovered at Google that Dan filed an application for copywrite in 1989, for a documentary script called, "The Best Thing," by

"Daniel L. Holland, whose pseud. is F. Q. Dutchman."

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Today, 50th Anniversary of My Missing Bipolar
Older Brother, "F.Q. Dutchman"

Tomorrow would be the 50th birthday of my older brother "Dan," but he disappeared around 1990, in the midst of a flight of fancy. My brother was highly creative, taking part as a child in a special program for future oceanographers; learning to play flute, upright bass and sousaphone.
He wrote prose and studied Latin, proposing to translate the entire "Les Miserables" from English to French as his final term project.

Although music was the center of his activities until he was sixteen, at some point, he stopped playing all instruments and he refused to explain to me why. Meanwhile his ideas became more grandiose; in the age of the Thriller video, Dan proposed to start a band with twenty somersaulting musicians young people, a traveling "We Are the World" concert that would change the world.

He became more eccentric, still as he went away to college. He was not visibly overweight, but when I visited him there in his first year, I discovered that he was spending his time building a virtual locker room in which he planned to keep all of his food under lock and key, to prevent himself from eating anything before its time had come. Only my brother had the keys to these many locks and compartments that would overcome his desire to eat.

It was just the beginning of a series of strange behaviors. My brother joined the Church of Scientology and became convinced that all of his mental dilemmas were due to misunderstandings of common words. He began searching for the exact meaning(s) of these words in dictionaries, convinced that he would eventually clarify all of his misunderstandings.

Although Dan was unemployed, he applied for an American Express card and used it to buy an expensive saxophone for a family member who had never played saxophone.

Then, he became very scary. His manias were becoming psychotic breaks with reality. Once after, I had moved away from mother's house, my mother told me that Dan had asked her to bury all of the knives in the house in the backyard, because he was afraid he might hurt someone. Only my brother could understand why burying the knives would help, while the hammers and crowbars and his bare hands didn't pose a similar danger. Surely his expressed fears were somehow related to his inner dialogue.

He began to sexually assault people. Once, before he was first diagnosed, and as my mother and I were practically physically compelling him to visit a psychiatric outpatient clinic, he reached out and fondled the breast of a stranger, a woman walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. As he did so, he said "woo, hoo, hoo"!

We apologized to the thirty-ish woman, knowing that Dan had just committed a potentially criminal act (unless he didn't understand the wrongfulness of his act and was unable to control his behavior). We told ourselves, and the woman that he was immediately on his way to see a doctor.

Later, he sexually assaulted a young female member of our family in a way so unspeakable that no one would describe to me precisely what he had done.

When we finally succeed in dragging him to a psychiatrist, the doctor told us something that none of us was immediately willing to accept: that my older brother had become manic depressive and only daily medication and regular visits to a psychiatrist could help him to improve. There must be another answer, I told myself, but I had no idea what that answer might be.

Dan was bipolar and refused to take the medicine that even I came to believe was absolutely necessary, because his unmedicated behavior was utterly intolerable. I was told that he went to New York, stole a car, and then drove up beside a police car, smiled broadly and announced that he was driving a stolen car. I was told he went to a marina and took off with a boat, for no particular reason other than that the idea had occurred to him and seemed too alluring to ignore.

But the medications prescribed were unacceptable to Dan. Lythium and other alternatives drove away his flights of mental fancy, but he liked to fly as few people can. Sometimes, he thought of his mania as a gift that others couldn't experience.

My mother was dedicated to my brother, going with him through his manic and depressive states, seeing behavior in which that no mother raises her child to engage.

I was in therapy for my own issues, and I asked my therapist how I could remain close to Dan while maintaining a semblance of sanity in my own life. My therapist said, "If you don't like roller-coasters than don't ride them."

I told Dan that although I couldn't compel him to take his medicine I would no longer be around him while he was not taking medication. This, I am told, hurt Danny deeply, because we had always been close friends. We had shared many eccentric and grandiose moments of hilarity, laughing at how the "poor dumb slobs" of the world went about their daily routines without a bit of reflection or awareness.

Dan began writing novels under the pseudonym "F.Q. Dutchman." Now, we were both caught in mental traps that neither of us knew how to escape.

The very last information I have about Dan comes from the Internet: Dan filed an application for copywrite in 1989, for a documentary script called, "The Best Thing," by "Daniel L. Holland, whose pseud. is F. Q. Dutchman."



Read The Full Article:
http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2010/01/tomorrow-would-be-50th-birthday-of-my
.html

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TSA Nominee Surrenders to Jim DeMint

Erroll Southers, Obama's nominee to run the Transportation Security Administration has withdrawn his name because he has become a "lightning rod for those with a political agenda." Read: Jim DeMint doesn't like unions, so I'm going to just run and hide.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2010/01/20/tsa-nominee-surrenders-to-jim-de
mint/

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The Teabagger Messiah. Dave Weigel has the goods

DOWNLOADS: (22)
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(h/t CSPANjunkie)

Hullabaloo

Attorney Scott Brown said in his victory speech:

"Our tax dollars should go to weapons to defeat [terrorists] not lawyers to defend them."

"Raising taxes and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country."

And his crowd is chanting "yes we can."

Scott Brown is trying to make believe he's a change agent, but really he's just another teabagger, as you can see. The Democratic firing squad is under way on the left, and what we're hearing is that it's either Coakley's fault or President Obama's fault or both for the clusterf&!k that led to Brown's victory, but pundits and readers are overlooking the role conservatives and their media infrastructure played in the process. To me, that's something that can't be ignored. I mean, Scott Brown did have help.

Dave Weigel followed the teabaggers in MA and explains that the right has something the left just doesn't have: An incredible media machine that is able to transmit their message faster and more powerfully than anything the Democrats have. Brown was able to turn to a bunch of conservative media outlets immediately, and ultimately that got his campaign off and running.

Media Outreach, Online Tactics Honed in 'Perfect Storm' GOP Win

Brown?s short campaign?he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a ?taxpayer march on Washington??masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

?I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,? said Willington. ?Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.?

In late December, not far under the radar, the Brown campaign was sold to influential and far-flung activists as a winnable race?a chance to stop complaining and actually break the back of the Obama administration. In a December 30 blog post titled ?Fight Everywhere: Scott Brown for Massachusetts,? GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini?who launched RebuildtheParty.com with Willington after the 2008 elections, and who provided some software support for Brown, made what was, at the time, a dreamy-sounding argument that Brown could win. ?Any chance we have to take out the Obamacare abomination,? he wrote, ?however remote, is a fight worth fighting.?

Organizers for both the Brown and Coakley campaigns now know that the race was fairly close by the time that this outreach occurred. In mid-December the National Republican Senatorial conducted, and kept secret, a poll that showed Brown down by only 13 points. As the candidate out-hustled Coakley, he was made available to conservative opinion-leaders. ?He did a wonderful job of going from conservative talk show to conservative talk show, getting his name out there,? said former state treasurer Joe Malone, a Republican, in an interview with local TV station WECN.

There was universal agreement among Brown supporters that the game-changing moment came from a source that Democrats mistrust almost as much as talk radio?pollster Scott Rasmussen. His January 5 poll showing Brown within 9 points of Coakley was immediately derided by Democrats. It didn?t matter.

?In terms of everyone becoming aware of it,? said Todd Feinburg, ?that was the moment it broke through.?

From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who?d backed Doug Hoffman. Where Coakley had been able to avoid national scrutiny, conservative blogs and media turned her stumbles into major stories. After the candidates debated on January 11, conservative medias promoted two storylines?that Coakley had erred in declaring that there were ?no terrorists? in Afghanistan, and that Brown had a ?Reagan moment? when he referred to the open Senate job as ?the People?s seat.? It was a line he?d used in interviews before, to little attention. On video, it got a prominent link from the Drudge Report.

The heat poured on after that. On January 13 Coakley flew to Washington to raise money at a long-scheduled event with the Massachusetts delegation. Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack, who had shaken up the momentum of the NY-23 special election after Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava?s husband called the cops on him, chased Coakley to ask an Afghanistan question and was pushed aside by an aide. McCormack tumbled; the photo of him sprawling on the ground as Coakley, hands in pockets, looked on, made it into the Boston Herald.

Every negative Coakley storyline was amplified and made infamous by the same means. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal?owned, like The Weekly Standard and Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch?s NewsCorp?ran an op-ed on Coakley?s record as attorney general, putting the spotlight on a gruesome case of sexual abuse involving a curling iron. The story, aired out earlier by the Boston Globe but not yet known to activists, became infamous, as did Coakley?s verbal stumbles. At Brown rallies attended by TWI, there was universal awareness of Coakley?s gaffes and the curling iron case.

This is part of the story and should not be missed.

Digby has a great post that sums it up nicely. The teabaggers are creating their own "Obama," in Brown, a man who will bring change. Not that he has any specifics, but the hero worship is real.

The Messiah Compulsion

The Democrats are all running around this morning looking panicked and freaked out which doesn't give anyone confidence. Everyone seems to forget that a year ago, Obama only had 58 votes in the Senate and everyone was in a state of near hysteria over his massive institutional power and soaring mandate. Now he has 59 and he's suddenly impotent. But this reaction was sadly predictable. And the message from the media and their centrist muses is also predictable --- move right immediately. SOS.

So it's hard to see today exactly where this is going, particularly on health care which many people are saying should be passed piecemeal --- "just the popular parts." I'll be looking forward to a bill which says that health insurance must cover everyone and can't cancel anyone but which has no cost controls. Somehow I don't think that's going to be popular for long. So, that's very much in flux as well.

Anyway, there are obviously many factors here, and frankly, because there were no exit polls done, we will probably never know exactly what combination of factors drove this race in Massachusetts. My personal opinion is that Scott Brown ran a vague campaign based upon personal charisma in the Barack Obama mode and became this year's vessel for protest against the status quo. The tea partiers are claiming him, as is the GOP establishment. And the media has declared him a maverick independent. Nobody knows who he *really* is, but in this era it seems that everybody's just looking for a young, handsome hero with a beautiful family to step in and save the day. (In fact, I think this particular paradigm was set by the special election of Arnold Schwarzenneger in California in 2003. As usual, as California goes ... oh lord.)

All the happy supporters at Scott Brown's victory party last night were shouting "yes we can."

It's fairly clear that this inchoate desire for "change" going forward is not going to benefit liberals much, and it's not just because they are erroneously perceived to be in charge in Washington. And that's because I think people are very much underestimating the conservative propaganda arm, and its creation, the teabaggers.

Chris Cillizza missed this point in his post about the winners and losers column. Not a mention about the right-wing noise machine -- which, to me, was the real game changer.

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Corporate Earnings: Alcoa (NYSE:AA), Intel
(NASDAQ:INTC), IBM (NYSE:IBM), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM)

As corporate earnings season is fully underway many of the shining star stocks have sold off after their earnings release. The first major stock to report two weeks ago was Alcoa (NYSE:AA). The stock had an amazing move higher trading at a high print of 17.60 prior to it’s earnings release. Once the earnings were released the stock sold off and it now currently trades at 15.25. Some recent stocks that have followed this pattern are Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) which all had negative reactions after their earnings release.

Why did these market leading stock sell off after…

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Beginnings of Legislative Strategy on HCR

The Hill is reporting that Senate Budget Chair Kent Conrad is cautiously open to using reconciliation to solve the HCR conundrum:

The Senate Budget Committee Chairman said Wednesday he’s willing to use special rules to force a final healthcare bill through with a simple majority vote.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) made clear his openness to applying budget reconciliation to healthcare, a position he opposed prior to this week’s special election in Massachusetts, is contingent on the content of the bill.

His comments lend weight to speculation that congressional Democratic leaders plan to have the House pass the Senate healthcare reform without changes, then pass a second bill with changes hashed out between the two chambers' leaders and the White House.

Kent Conrad's is going to be cautious about everything, but this is an encouraging development. It suggests that the Senate really does recognize the difficulty of getting to 218 in the House, as Barney Frank's call to kill the bill suggests.

"I think the measure that would have passed, that is, some compromise between the House and Senate bill, which I would have voted for, although there were some aspects of both bills I would have liked to see change, I think that's dead," Frank said in an interview Wednesday morning on Sirius-XM Radio. "It is certainly the case that the bill that would have passed, a compromise between the House and Senate bills, isn't going to pass, in my judgment, and certainly shouldn't."

I'm still not entirely sure what Frank was saying there, but with Conrad being at least open to this possibility, the bill needn't be killed. Don't kill the bill, improve the bill. There is still the opportunity to fix it, both in terms of policy and politics, by drafting a reconciliation bill that the House can agree to, and passing it and the Senate bill both.

It's a strange day to be agreeing with Kent Conrad over Barney Frank, but on this one, I do. Don't kill the bill. Fix it.

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Lessons that should be learned from Coakley's
defeat, but probably won't be.

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won?t let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.

Right now the corporate-owned media is all atwitter with how the loss of the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in what should have been a shoe-in election stands as a repudiation of Obama's nonexistent leftist policies. Actually, his policies have been nothing but a continuation of Bush-Cheney (Glenn Greenwald has compiled some of the better entries describing how closely Obama mirrors Bush), but never let it be said that the right-wing media can be counted on to tell the truth.

The fact is that Coakley lost because of something comedian and political commentator Bill Maher pointed out last year that bears repeating:

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Even Coakley herself acknowledges, if only belatedly after having run an incompetent campaign, that the reason she lost was because Democrats are now the party of big business and Republicans ? who have spent the last three decades cementing themselves as that party and transforming government into an extension of big business ? are now capitalizing on the opportunity to run as populist opponents of wrong-headed government policies.

"If Scott Brown wins tonight he'll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it. And right now they think they've got economic policies for Washington that are delivering more for banks than Main Street."

But, of course, Democratic Party misleaders are already blaming the left for Coakley's defeat. In their twisted mode of thinking, it's the job of the left-wing base to turn out and support their right-wing candidates no matter what, not the job of Democratic politicians to campaign and govern in support of policies that benefit their constituents. Just as in the route of 1994, Democrats are taking the wrong lessons from a midterm-year defeat. Greenwald writes:

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats' problems on "the furthest left elements," which he claims dominates the Democratic Party -- seriously. And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal: "Blame the Left for Massachusetts" (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the "liberal" public option and mandate; he apparently doesn't know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the "mandate" is there to please the insurance industry, not "the Left," which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis' claim that "candidate Obama's health-care proposal did not include a public option" is nothing short of an outright lie).

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by "the Left," let alone "the furthest left elements" of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left "ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months." The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion -- only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry. Nor was it "the Left" -- but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis -- who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets.

The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials -- and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems -- has been captive "to the Left" is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it. For better or worse, the Democratic strategy has long been and still is to steer clear of their leftist base and instead govern as "pragmatists" and centrists -- which means keeping the permanent Washington factions pleased. That strategy may or not be politically shrewd, but it is just a fact that the dreaded "Left" has gotten very little of what it wanted the entire year. Is there anyone who actually believes that "The Left" is in control of anything, let alone the Democratic Party? The fact that Lanny Davis -- to prove the Left's dominance -- has to cite one provision that was jettisoned (the public option) and another which the Left hates (the mandate) reflects how false that claim is. What are all of the Far Left policies the Democrats have been enacting and Obama has been advocating? I'd honestly love to know.

Common sense, but let it also not be said that the Democratic Party's misleaders have even an ounce of that among them. So what can be done about this continuing rightward trend? Sam Smith of The Progressive Review lays out a good strategy for what we as the left-wing of the party should be pushing.

I can't post all of them here, but here are some methods that stand out as being the most common sense ? and which have been proven to get results (just ask the GOP):

Define your politics issue by issue, not icon by icon. One reason progressive politics fares so poorly is because we spend too much time on individual campaigns and not enough on issues. While the former tend to drive away the independent, the skeptical and those who don't like a particular a candidate, the latter can attract all sorts to join with others who may agree only one issue.

This goes to something David Sirota wrote a while back about what happens when political parties subjugate political movements. Democrats have become all about the politics of personality, about elevating individual candidates, rather than the causes for which the left is fighting. This is what needs to change above all else.

Define your politics by issue by issue, not by ideology. It's a lot easier to get a cross section of people backing a particular issue than it is for them to buy into your whole philosophy of life. Use the former approach on the streets and save the latter for the bar. You don't need common ideology if you have common causes.

Again, common sense. You can make an argument for a progressive position on a given issue without going into why progressivism is the better ideology.

Don't dis' those whose votes you need. Convert them with policies that actually help them. Do a good enough job and they'll forget about abortions and gay marriage.

This should be so sensible as to be pointless to explain, but with so much hostility displayed by Democrats toward leftists within and outside the party, it needs repeating.

And in case you're thinking about supporting Obama for re-election in 2012, assuming Republicans don't retake the House and bully the Senate into impeaching and removing him before then, remember this:

Remember that minorities have diversity, too. Just because a black politician talks about hope and change doesn't mean he's Martin Luther King. Especially if he's from Chicago.

Learn these and the other lessons provided, and we might just survive long enough to actually gain power. Otherwise, don't come crying when we're stuck right back where we started after the next election.

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