Insuring Defeat

By vetoing Congress's SCHIP renewal bill 2 weeks ago, Bush seems to be making a real effort to increase or at least solidify his current 70-ish percent 'disapproval' rating with the citizenry. In Salon.com, Walter Shapiro opined that this 'battle' is only part of the entire healthcare 'war' that is raging in the country and that Bush and especially those Congressional Republicans choosing to stand by him on this issue will be in trouble as the 2008 election rolls around.

Also in Salon.com, news editor Joan Walsh, cited yet another 'no holds barred' right-wing attack campaign on a family who dared to speak publicly about the SCHIP issue. She states what is increasingly becoming obvious, that the O'Reilly's and Malkins of the world are, like their increasingly irrelevant standard bearer, becoming unimportant. And Ann Coulter? Right now she's probably taken about as seriously as Vince McMahon. Like so many 'Baby Face' Finsters, these folks seem unbeatable or scary until you realize that you can simply pick them up and put them back into their cribs.

To put this in larger context, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, was interviewed on WNYC's Leonard Lopate program on 10/16/07. He spoke about his latest book, The Conscience of a Liberal, that discusses the rise and fall of the New Deal, the War on Poverty and how the socio-political pendulum may be swinging back to the left. Listen to the interview here:



Bush & Co. don't seem to notice this and their actions are actually accelerating the pendulum.

Dear Karen

In Salon.com today Sidney Blumenthal, writer and former Clinton advisor, published an open letter written to Karen Hughes. Hughes is currently in the State Dept. holding a newly created post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. She is also one of the oldest members of Bush's coterie from the Texas days still left in the administration. The letter invites Hughes to a private screening of "Taxi to The Dark Side", a documentary about the administration's torture policies and urges her to use her influence with Bush to alter his current policy on torture. That policy can be boiled down to denying that we torture but approving specific 'interrogation techniques' that any reasonable person would define as torture. In the end of the letter, Blumenthal describes to Hughes what her choices are:

"While you are rethinking how to calm fears and rebuild America's image as a global leader perhaps you ought to begin to think of yourself not as a tool of the Bush administration but as a citizen of the world, not as a propagandist, constantly trying to formulate a hollow ideological phrase or distraction, but as someone who can admit mistakes and correct them."
"If you receive this letter as simply a partisan broadside and can't envision your transformation into a true diplomat at large, an envoy of healing, perhaps you should just resign. Nothing will be served by continuing on your current course. Nothing different will happen. You might as well return to Texas now. To date, your diplomacy has consisted of excuses for leaving the damage to the next president to remedy." (Salon.com 10/11/07)

How have we come to this point? The administration, in defiance of international law, U.S. court decisions and public opinion continues to torture. They justify this by defining the word torture so narrowly as to effectively remove it from the vocabulary. Indeed, many professional interrogation experts like Col. Stuart Herrington, say that the current techniques in use are basically useless and mostly counter-productive.

History will definitely view this president's record with regards to civil liberties alongside the shameful examples of The Red scare of the 1920s, the Japanese-American interment in 1942 and McCarthy-ism in the 1950s. Many would argue that it is worse than any of these. I tend to agree.

"I Forbid", redux

George W. Bush has seen fit to use his veto power ("I forbid" in Latin) only 3 times before, the first in July of 2006, to block a Congressional measure to use Federal money for stem cell research. So, out of all the bad legislation that was passed by Republican controlled Congresses for 6 years, he chose to veto one of the only good bills. Now, Bush has said he will veto the current renewal of the SCHIP (state childrens health insurance program) as it's being debated in Congress. It seems that our President almost seeks to be on the wrong side of any given issue, no matter how experts, not to mention the public, feel.

One thing everyone, even 'the Decider', agree on is that the entire system of healthcare delivery in this country is an unqualified mess. Ever since Kaiser healthcare of California in the early 1970s thought it would be a great idea to become a for-profit venture and Nixon quietly killed any regulations to the contrary, medical costs and quality of care have been going in opposite directions. This has only accelerated in the last 15 years as the markets figured out that there was money to be made by charging individuals and businesses enormous premiums and providing them with free preventative care - the 'M' in HMO stands for maintenence - but then only providing partial or no coverage for actual needed medical procedures. Catastrophic illness? You're basically on your own. Is it any surprise that the cause of the majority of personal bankruptcies of late is large medical bills for serious illness? A lot of these people even had supposed health coverage through work.

Almost all economists (including this holder of a BA in economics) know, that of all the services provided in an economy, healthcare and education work horribly in a for-profit/free market model. The same can also can be said for news media and public utilities. The reasons are simple - these services are a necesity for everyone that provide unmeasurable benefits for the overall society years down the road. The 'consumers need to shop around' argument that Republicans and even some Democrats (Hillary?) like to use is, in a word, ridiculous. This theory may work when consumers are shopping for preventative care, but that service is already provided for free by both governmental and for-profit entitites. If someone is having a heart attack, was just diagnosed with a tumor or whose child needs major corrective surgery, can they honestly be expected to 'shop around' for the 'best deal'?!? We're talking about life and death decisions! If anything, they should be shopping around for the best doctor, not the best bargain!

Another shoddy argument that gets thrown around (I won't even get into the right-wingers who spew the words 'socialized medicine' every 2 minutes) is that, yes our healthcare is expensive and growing fast, but the quality of our care is second to none. Wrong. Perhaps it's second to none if you're financially capable of writing 5 figure checks for premiums every year and then 6 figure checks if a serious illness occurs, but for the other 98% of us it is not. Out of all the industrialized nations, we are last or near last in almost all health measurements: infant mortality, average life span, etc. Why is this if we're spending so much? Because the system is FOR PROFIT. That money that should be providing second to none care for everyone is siphoned off in the form of stock dividends, cash dividends, capital gains and large bonuses for the executives that run the HMOs. Oh, I almost forgot, a lot of the money also goes to politicians via the healthcare lobby to help perpetuate this incredibly broken system.

Bush's threatened veto, petty as it is, is only the latest media sideshow in a major issue that needs to fixed. In the current political environment, it doesn't look to happen anytime soon.

Backbone

Conservatives may claim that, unlike liberals, they have backbone. In reality, liberals have backbone also, the difference is we choose to use the brain that rests atop it.

On Monday, Sept. 24 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got to speak at Columbia University. Shortly after stepping onto the stage, he would surely regret it. While close minded, lock-step conservatives and strutting chicken hawks, from the once admired John McCain to the unintelligent cesspool that is Rush Limbaugh, screamed bloody murder about Ahmadinejad being allowed to speak at Columbia, Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia, had different plans. See video below of his opening remarks before Ahmadinejad spoke:



What the McCains, Limbaughs and FoxNews-philes of the world don't understand in their limited black and white intellectual spheres, is that by letting someone talk freely, doesn't mean you agree with them. Indeed, sometimes the more you let someone like Ahmadinejad speak, the more of an idiotic, lying despot they appear. You'd have thought the Republicans would have figured that out after six years of Bush.

Lee Bollinger called Ahmadinejad out - to his face, by the way - not by blathering into a TV studio camera or a radio microphone. In case anyone forgot, Bollinger's pointed, stern, yet humble closing remark is what real intellectual leadership looks like. This video is from YouTube, we should hope it gets many millions of hits in Mr. Ahmadinejad's home country.

Goldstein of the Week

Yes, once again George Orwell must be somewhere laughing - or crying - or both. On the heels of al-Qaeda's fall season video premiers over the last couple of weeks. including "Tora Bora Martyr Makeover", the media and assorted local New York and national political 'leaders' have turned their collective blood-lust onto a new target- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Case in point:

Ahmadinejad announced last week that he wanted to visit ground zero, ostensibly to lay a wreath to honor the dead. The dead that he thinks were killed by a Zionist conspiricy, of course. I was of the opinion that he should've been allowed there, however surrounded by a few dozen members of the Ironworkers local, some off duty members of 'NYs finest' and a few guys from a half dozen FDNY ladder companies to boot. My guess is if he was stupid enough to go into his 'America is Satan' schtick at that point, he would've been choking on his own teeth after about ten seconds. Maybe these were the 'security concerns' that officials cited last week in their denial of his request.

That said, I think all the haters need to take a deep breath. If an auditorium full of Columbia undergrads and graduate students can't intellectually slice up this guy nine ways to Sunday, then we may have a bigger problem than we think. Actually, excluding the Holocaust denying, the Israel map wiping off and the Zionist 9/11 conspiricy stuff, this guy makes some valid points. Really, what has he said that was any more idiotic than "they want to take away our freedom"? Uhhh, no George, I don't think they give a shit about our freedom, and besides, they're not taking it away, YOU ARE! Not to mention making a holy f#*king mess out of everything you touch.

What gets a lot less play is that Ahmadinejad may actually be worse at running Iran than Bush is at running our country. Despite sky-high oil prices, employment is down in Iran, poverty is up, there is more underground unrest and the government is much less secular than in recent years - oops, my mistake - I guess we'll call that last one even.

(the style of this post inspired by JS, BM and of course HST)

"Our Long National Nightmare Continues"

In the shadow of General Petreus' long awaited report on the status of the Iraqi troop 'surge', George Packer in The New Yorker has written a sobering - and depressing - assessment of our way forward. At the end of the piece, he dismally concludes:

"The war was born in the original sins of deceptive salesmanship, divisive politics, and wishful thinking about the aftermath. The bitterness of that history continues to undermine American interests in Iraq and the Middle East today. President Bush will have his victory at any cost, with one eye on his next Churchillian speech and the other on his place in history, leaving the implementation of his war policy to an Administration that works at cross purposes with itself, promising freedom and delivering rubble. The opposition is plainly eager to hang a defeat around his neck and move on from what it always regarded as Bush’s war. Before the U.S. can persuade the world to unite around a shared responsibility for Iraq, Americans will have to do it first. The problems created by the war will require solutions that don’t belong to a single political party or President: the rise of Iranian power, the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the radicalization of populations, the huge refugee crisis, the damage to a new generation of Iraqis who are growing up amid the unimaginable. Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won’t let it happen." (The New Yorker, 9/17/07)

Packer also draws the obvious conclusion that though many would like to make comparisons between our involvement in Iraq and the Vietnam war, the consequences of our folly this time around will be much more damaging.

The Timeline

Well, another slick little gear-shift by the Bush administration this week. According to The Washington Post:

"President Bush plans to formally embrace the drawdown of U.S. forces as recommended by Petraeus yesterday, U.S. officials said today. In a speech scheduled for Thursday at 9 p.m., Bush will tell the nation he plans to end the 30,000-troop surge into Iraq by next summer but will caution that those and further cuts depend on continued progress in Iraq, the officials said."

Now mind you, if the 30,000 troop surge is ended by next summer, there will still be 130,000+ troops still there and at least that many private contractors. Additionally, ending the surge by next summer sounds an awful lot like Bush is setting a timeline. Yes, a timeline, that word that Bush heaped such disdain on after the new Democratic majority arrived in town last year. That word that practically caused Cheney and other neo-con think-tankers to spit blood.

Whether he's trying to steal the Democrats' thunder by talking timelines and troop cuts or simply making decisions in a political (and reality) vacuum, the fact remains that Bush won't be doing anything substantive to clean up his own mess. That will be up to the next resident of 1600 Penn. ave.