Worse than Nothing

After months of compromise, backroom dealing and sellouts, the Senate Finance Committee, led by Senator Max Baucus, has unveiled its health-care reform plan. To put it mildly, the proposal is worse than nothing:

• No public option
• No requirement for employers to provide coverage
  
• Seniors and people living in supposed "high risk" areas would pay up to 7.5 times the premiums of other Americans regardless of income
  
• Premiums of up to 13% of adjusted gross income - before any deductibles, co-payments, co-insurance or any other out-of-pocket expenses
• Verification of citizenship before any treatment
• No public funds for abortion
  
• Very high annual out-of-pocket limits - up to $5,950 for individuals and $11,900 for families
  
• People denied or stripped of coverage due to pre-existing conditions must go without insurance for six months - and be responsible for all medical costs during that period - before being able to enroll in a "high-risk pool"
• Anyone who rejects the insurance plan provided by their employer (even if it costs too much and covers too little) and can't afford to buy insurance privately will be fined

And so on. This sorry excuse for a plan is what we get when bipartisanship is put above getting a good bill. It's been brutally obvious for months that the Republicans have no interest in working on any kind of health reform bill. And to no one's surprise, the GOP immediately rejected the Baucus plan out of hand.

Genuine bipartisanship works like this:

• Democrat: This is my bill.
• Republican: I don't like sections A, B and C.
• Democrat: All right, then let's work together to resolve the disputes.
• (Interlude, consisting of compromise)
  
• Democrat: I got rid of section A, made minor changes to section B and you're going to have to live with section C.
• Republican: I think that's reasonable. I'll vote for it.
  

But this is the kind of "bipartisanship" we've been seeing from the Republicans:

• Democrat: This is my bill.
• Republican: I hate this bill and everything about it. I won't vote for it.
• Democrat: I don't need your vote to pass the bill, but I want it anyway.
  
• (Interlude, consisting of teabagging and wild shrieking)
• Democrat: OK, I ripped the guts out of the bill, turned it into a shadow of its former self, and made it so that it's worse than doing nothing. Now will you support it?
• Republican: No. And you're a Communist.

Too many Democrats still labor under the impression that the GOP wants to compromise. They don't. Everyone knew the Republicans would reject anything Baucus could have come up with, and indeed he has done nothing but waste everyone's time and effort.

Since the Republicans have shown bad faith at every stage of the process, the Democrats should just tell them to go jump in the lake. They should use their strong majorities in both houses of Congress to pass a real health-reform bill, one which actually makes people healthier instead of insurance companies richer. If the GOP doesn't like it, too bad. They don't have the votes to block it.

Will the Democrats get some cojones and actually do it? Or will they continue to sell their souls for Republican votes they don't need and can't get anyway?

Lighten Up

I was going to comment on Saturday's teabagger rallies, but thinking about them makes my brain hurt. So instead, here's something a little different.

Back in 2004, Republican Jack Ryan was the man to beat in the Illinois Senate race. He had the money, the coverage, the endorsements and the support of the Christian right. And then Jeri Ryan showed up.

Jeri, better known as Borg babe Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, was once married to Jack before the union dissolved in a messy divorce. One of the messiest parts revolved around Jeri's allegations of Jack's appetites being, well, nonstandard.

I [Jeri] made clear to Respondent [Jack] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ...

The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.

Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.

When the divorce files were unsealed and made public, Jack first called his ex-wife a liar and then dropped out of the race. With only a few months to go to the election, the national GOP had to scramble for a replacement candidate, especially after Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka turned them down. The party eventually went out of state to get Alan Keyes, the party's token black conservative, to stand in on the ballot. The far-right (he has since become a birther) Keyes never had a chance and was creamed in November by a state senator named Barack Obama.

Fast-forward five years. Republican uber-pundit Jonah Goldberg has spent most of the last year shrieking about Obama's election and America's subsequent transformation into a socialist (or fascist, he can't seem to make up his mind) tyranny. After all, look at how many teabaggers were arrested and/or beaten to a pulp on Saturday by Obama's private army of ACORN operatives and indoctrinated schoolchildren.

There weren't any? Really? I'm pretty sure I heard something about how America is now a dictatorship where dissent is punished harshly. Oh well, never mind.

Anyway, Goldberg has decided who is to blame for our current situation. It's Jeri Ryan.

Yesterday, Goldberg posted to his Twitter page:

Lightened up?

The lady's husband took her to places she did not want to go, which clearly upset her and left her feeling betrayed, and this guy's response is to tell her to lighten up? Did he not have enough tweet room to tell her she should have taken one for the team?

And the Republicans wonder why their party is so often seen as hostile to women.

Rise of the Tenthers

Evidently believing that birthers and deathers insufficiently cut the mustard, the latest arrivals in the world of political crackpottery are the tenthers. These people claim fealty to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

For years, the amendment has been cited by libertarians and states-rights activists to oppose federal laws they don't like on the grounds they're not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The amendment was used prior to the Civil War to defy federal anti-slavery laws, and again a century later to defy federal desegregation laws. Both instances ended badly for the contemporary tenthers.

According to the tenthers, the federal government cannot regulate food safety, assault rifles, highway standards or financial markets. Federal laws against such crimes as destroying aircraft, hunting endangered species, discrimination and mail fraud are all invalid. All government operations from Social Security and Medicare to the Veterans Administration and the GI Bill must be chucked into the garbage. All that would be left up to the states, and if they don't want to run such programs or punish such crimes - well, them's the breaks, even it results in a crazy-quilt patchwork of a national legal system.

This year, a number of state legislatures have introduced or even passed "sovereignty resolutions" invoking the amendment to declare themselves exempt from whatever laws the federal government might pass. Particularly in Texas, some have taken this movement to its logical extreme, promoting outright secession from the country.

Now we can add Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty to the tenthers' ranks. Last night in a Republican Governors Association conference call with conservative activists, he made plain his feelings about the cause of health care reform. "It's frightening," he said, "it's ludicrous, it's a bad idea and the country is against it." (Actually, the country is for it, but folks like Pawlenty have never let facts get in the way of their talking points.)

Asked if he would use the amendment to block health reform in his state, Pawlenty replied:

Depending on what the federal government comes out with here, asserting the Tenth Amendment might be [a] viable option, but we don’t know the details. As one of the other callers said, we can't really even get the president to outline what he does or doesn't support in any detail. So we'll have to see. I'd say that's a possibility. You're starting to see more governors, including me, and specifically Governor Perry from Texas, and most Republican governors express concern around these issues and get more aggressive about asserting and bringing up the Tenth Amendment. So I think we could see hopefully a resurgence of those claims and maybe even lawsuits if need be.

(Note that he mentions only Republican governors considering this move. You know, partisan politics just might be involved here.) Pawlenty and other tenthers conveniently forget another part of the Constitution. Article I lays out Congress' powers, and Section 8 in particular says:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. [emphasis added]

Isn't it reasonable to say that keeping the American population as a whole healthy makes us a stronger and more defensible nation? Doesn't making sure that people won't have to worry about losing everything if they get sick fall under the category of "general Welfare?" Seems to me that the Constitution clearly allows Congress to pass such laws.

Sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. You can't claim ultimate supremacy of the Constitution while using one part of it to reject another part. Next!

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

On the morning after President Obama's health-care speech to Congress, the Interwebs were buzzing about Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). You see, at one point Obama explained that any reforms "would not apply to those who are here illegally," whereupon Wilson shouted, "You lie!" A breach of etiquette, to be sure.

Anyway, Wilson showed not only that he can't tell the difference between the House of Representatives and a teabagger rally, but also that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He wasn't just wrong, he was very obviously wrong. If you look at the bill and search for the words "undocumented" or "alien," you will very quickly find this on page 143:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Pretty self-explanatory, don't you think? If you're in the country illegally, you're not covered by the bill. Plain and simple.

All summer, one of the teabaggers' favorite refrains was that senators and representatives supposedly didn't bother to read the bill text. If nothing else, Wilson just proved them right, at least as far as he's concerned. If he had actually taken the time to read the bill he so loudly opposes, he wouldn't have made such a jackass of himself on the House floor last night.

The Ick Factor Rides Again

It's happened so many times you'd think it would be obvious by now. If you talk loudly about the "sanctity of marriage" to prevent gays and lesbians from participating in that same sanctity, if you fly your "family values" on a very large and public flagpole, if you set yourself up as a yardstick by which everyone else should structure their moral lives - if you do all that, you'd darn well better walk the walk. Mark Sanford, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston - the list of hypocrites goes on and on.

And now we can add Michael Duvall, a California state representative from Orange County, to that roster of shame. He is a conservative Republican who opposes gay marriage while touting his own marriage and two children.

Indeed, he is so far to the right he received a 100% rating from the Capitol Resource Institute, an explicitly Christian lobbying group set up "to educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature." (Of course, their definition of "family" excludes same-sex families.) And just for good measure, he introduced a bill banning the creation and sale of T-shirts with the names of dead soldiers alongside such political statements as "Bush Lied," etc.

So what did he do? The OC Weekly reports that just before the start of a committee meeting, he was regaling a colleague with some rather gross details of his romps with not one but two women not his wife when his microphone went live, broadcasting his words on TV. (I will not get into the sordid intricacies of Duvall's bragging, mostly because thinking about them makes me want to saw off the top of my head and scrub out my brain with a Brillo pad. If you're a masochist who revels in the Ick Factor, have at it.)

As if to prove that yes, it can get worse, both women are lobbyists for companies regulated by his committee. For his part, Duvall never even tried being discreet:

Legislative sources say they have witnessed Duvall, who is vice chairman of the Assembly's powerful Committee on Utilities & Commerce, socializing after-hours with [Heidi] Barsuglia [one of his lobbyist mistresses]. Sources - who asked for anonymity because of Duvall's power in the capital - say Susan Duvall usually stays in Orange County during the week, when her husband flies to Sacramento. They also say they have seen Duvall with Barsuglia in restaurants, "arm-in-arm" at political fund-raising events and even shopping together for groceries just blocks from the capitol building.

"Their relationship is the worst-kept secret in Sacramento," a capitol staffer recently told me. "He's old and fat. She's hot, blonde and about 20 years younger. He could have never gotten a woman like that before he got this job.'"

So we have the specter - again - of a moral high-horse type who doesn't bother to live up to his own standards, and who is literally in bed with the lobbyists to boot.

After the scandal broke, Duvall tried explaining it away by issuing a statement saying "I deeply regret the comments I made in what I believed to be a private conversation." Didn't work; the howls kept coming. So late today, he finally gave up and resigned:

I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state. I have come to the conclusion that it would not be fair to my family, my constituents or to my friends on both sides of the aisle to remain in office. Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work.

Note that he doesn't regret the hypocrisy or the corruption, only that he was caught bragging about it.

You really think they would have figured it out by now: if you can't or won't keep it in your pants, don't lecture anyone else about it.

Be True to Your (Socialist) School

There is a scene in the 1984 movie Red Dawn in which our all-American heroes sneak into town only to find it dominated by the Communist invaders. Tanks are on the streets, the local movie house is showing Alexander Nevsky and propaganda posters blaring "A New Man Arises from the Ashes of Capitalism" decorate buildings. In other words, it's pretty much the sort of world wingnuts were expecting to find this morning after President Obama delivered his school speech yesterday.

You may recall that the White House announced last week that the president would give a back-to-school speech telling kids to work hard and stay in school. The right wing promptly panicked en masse, convinced he would tell them to embrace socialism, inform on their parents, hand their elders over to the death panels, worship at the Church of Barack, etc. With parents pulling their kids out of class and principals refusing to show the speech at all, Obama told kids to...work hard and stay in school.

This morning, the sun rose on an America pretty much exactly the same as the one it set on last night. Not surprisingly, this has made no impact on the paranoid right whatsoever.

Florida GOP chair Jim Greer, who started all this nonsense with his primal scream warning of "Obama's socialist ideology," now says that the White House rewrote the speech to take out all the red stuff. Pressed by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, he reluctantly admitted to not having any actual information to back up his claim.

Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh said that Obama's call for students to take responsibility for their education actually meant the exact opposite:

The theme of his speech today was take personal responsibility, which none of his policies encourage. None of his policies even allow it. You want to take care of your own health care? No way! You're going to get a government-mandated health care plan regardless, and you can't do anything about it. You can't assume responsibility for your own health care. You can't assume responsibility for your own job. You can't assume responsibility for your own car. "No, no, no! You're too stupid to do any of that." So he goes out and tells these kids, "You've gotta take personal responsibility"? He never even does that in his own life.

So let me get this straight - after years of Limbaugh telling everyone to take responsibility for their own actions, a president says just that and his response is to go on the attack. It's a logical pretzel, but I gave up trying to make sense of Limbaugh's rants years ago.

The comments on Fox Nation were no more well-informed:

• "I don't care what he says. I do not want to hear it, because everytime his lips move, he is lying. He got what he wanted, all the parents read the dang thing anyway. I do not watch the propaganda on tv...and I wouldn't want my kids to see him on tv. He is on enough, anyway. ...I don't trust him, he is only after power and politics. If the left wants seperation from church and state, I want seperation from school and politics."
• "If we had not complained about his original plan and speech it would not have been rewritten. We would have had a lot of ammunition if he had delivered the original. Alas, it is better to protect our children from this communist. I have no doubt that Obama and his shadow government will most certainly supply plenty of vile and objectionable statements and actions in the near future."
• "Maybe our commie pres. should be taken care of business instead of B.S.ing our children? I don't trust this man ..........or his 'speeches'...or his 'czars'.......or ANYTHING about him! **=="
• "ENOUGH OF THIS LIBERALISM,my granddaughter is 5 years old in kindergarten.I just learned her teacher was doing polling last week on what president they would vote for.They are just starting out the new year and I don't know if this was the build up.They were using jellybeans for whatever reason.I see Obama building his civilian army from the ground up.This reminds me of the Hitler youth.PBS over the week-end showed Van Jones talking to students at another school venue earlier in the year.Parents better take charge and ask questions of their teachers.Don't let the village raise the child.Parents monitor your child's school work.This did not happen overnight,the times are changing,text books are changing,teaching humanism,evolution,and global warming religion in it self.Van Jones,self described communist in the White House.We have fired,sentence people for treason.What secrets has Obama given up? Obama just said this week-end he cannot remember promises he has made after he drinks his wine.Perhaps he should step away from the wine,America is too important to loose; Obama's comment was made at a event.It reminded me of the Kennedy wake to what politicians said about Ted getting too much alcohol in his system to remember what happened the night before. Obama is a radical and there is no other way to put it. If Obama were not the president he should not be exposed to any president because of his radical views,they searched Van Jones out and brought him in,a communist."
  

And so on and so forth, a continuing torrent of deranged paranoia.

Anyway, we now know just what the Republicans stand for - blowing off homework and dropping out of school. Perhaps they should just rename themselves the Grand Obtuse Party and get it over with. At least that way they don't have to learn new initials.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

In my house, "stupid" is a bad word. But sometimes it's the only one that fits.

The White House announced last week that President Obama would make a back-to-school speech to America's students on the importance of education. No big deal - Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made similar speeches. This time, however, the right wing exploded in blind paranoid rage, calling the speech "indoctrination" and comparing it to recruitment for the Hitler Youth.

Displaying a fine disregard for irony as well as facts, wingnuts galore told parents to pull their kids out of school to prevent them from hearing a speech urging them to stay in school.

With parents driven to hysteria by all the screaming, the media has finally realized that the people pushing this stuff really are nuts. John Harwood of that red network CNBC put it best:

Let's face it, in a country of three hundred million people there are a lot of stupid people too, because if you believe that's it's somehow unhealthy for kids for the president to say work hard and stay in school, you're stupid.

So after these last few days of idiotic tumult in the schools, we now have the prepared text of Obama's speech tomorrow. Just as everyone feared, it's chock-full of socialist exhortations to lock up all ObamaCare opponents in FEMA concentration camps and worship Chairman Obama for the god he is.

Nah, just kidding. As the sane parts of the country knew all along, it's your standard education speech. Obama will talk about students' responsibility for their own education, their need to put down the Xbox and pick up the textbook. To do any less would be a disservice not just to themselves but to the country as a whole:

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can't drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that - if you quit on school - you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

So - that's that, right? You wish.

I absolutely guarantee that the usual crowd of teabaggers and blind Obama-haters, who have never let facts get in the way of anything, will not let this go. Rather, they will seize on Obama's comments to "prove" that he's pushing socialism, regardless of any facts or sanity. Or they will claim that the prepared text is merely a ruse, and that he will tell kids something very different tomorrow.

Or something else equally crazy and, yes, stupid.

Glenn Beck vs. Art

Glenn Beck, Fox News' very own demagogic combination of Howard Beale and Father Coughlin, has outdone himself. Yes, after ranting about President Obama's racism, Nazi health care and indoctrination in schools, he has taken on the world of art.

In a bit truly stunning for its tinfoil-hat craziness, Beck railed against the supposed Communist and Fascist art (what, they couldn't make up their minds?) installed at New York's Rockefeller Center more than seventy years ago.

Rockefeller Center is home to MSNBC - and also to Fox News, as Keith Olbermann gleefully pointed out on his own show. (You'd think Fox would catch something like that. But it's more likely that Beck has no one at all tasked with stopping him from making a jackass out of himself.)

And when Beck howls that people "need to see things that are hidden in plain sight," one should mention that other people see things no one else can see, and they have to take a lot of pills for it.

Many have wondered before just how connected Beck is to reality, but this one really takes the cake. People who actually know something about art history hooted in derision, and even some mainstream conservatives are starting to see him not as a voice of the populist masses but as a paranoid and increasingly unhinged conspiracy theorist.

Every time he starts shrieking about a (misspelled) oligarchy or how an elected president is about to "seize power," he sucks everyone connected with him, even tangentially, into the same nutty black-helicopter crowd. His advertisers are fleeing in droves, and one wonders just how much of a liability he'll have to become before Fox News realizes there's no upside in keeping him on the schedule.

Why the GOP Is Ignorant

Next Tuesday, President Obama will deliver an online speech to the nation's children just as the school year begins, in which he is scheduled to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning."

Now, one would think this is pretty standard for a president. After all, both Presidents Bush made the same sort of speech. But since the president involved is Barack Obama, the Republican Party is naturally having a hissy fit over it.

To be specific, Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer is having a hissy fit over it. In a press release sent out yesterday, Greer blasted Obama for daring to tell America's children to do their homework:

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

And it goes downhill from there. The full thing must be seen to be believed.

From Greer's diatribe, one would think Obama plans to read to America's schoolchildren from The Communist Manifesto, lead them in a rousing chorus of "The Internationale," start the Pledge of Allegiance with "I pledge allegiance to Barack Obama" and end it with "Allahu Akbar!" It has no connection with reality whatsoever.

But since it is (a) critical of Obama and (b) completely nuts, the usual suspects - Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, etc - are predictably jumping all over it. Other pundits and bloggers told parents to keep their kids home from school on Tuesday, ensuring that they won't be exposed to the president with the side effect of missing any lessons which happen to be taught that day.

So not only do we have yet another example of the pettiness of right-wing rage, we also see just how much they value their kids' education. After all, if they're willing to pull them out of school to protect them from hearing someone talk about the importance of learning, one wonders from what else they're willing to protect them - the tyranny of 2+2=4, perhaps.

Let's face it - this latest in a (very) long line of supposed Obama outrages has nothing to do with what he will actually say. It's about the man himself. He could personally shoot Osama bin Laden in the head on the Fourth of July to the strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers" and he would still be attacked as a Socialist Muslim who wants to destroy America.

At least we now know why the Republicans so often appear to be deliberately ignorant. It's because they hate studying.