Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Fireside chat for March 13, 2010 (VIDEO)

The President discusses his blueprint for an updated Elementary and Secondary Education Act to overhaul No Child Left Behind, the latest step from his Administration to encourage change and success in America’s schools at the local level.

Friday, March 12, 2010

"Back on planet normal..."

Matt Yglesias (originally caught by Andrew Sullivan):

[N]obody lasts in office forever, no congressional majority lasts forever, and no party controls the White House forever. But the measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP.

Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Reconcile This! (I know a trend when I see one)

Ezra and Krugman have both used this, so I figured, better late than never? (Krugman's favorite bit in bold).

Though we have tried to engage in a serious discussion, our efforts have been met by repeatedly debunked myths and outright lies. At the same time, Republicans have resorted to extraordinary legislative maneuvers in an effort not to improve the bill, but to delay and kill it. After watching these tactics for nearly a year, there is only one conclusion an objective observer could make: these Republican maneuvers are rooted less in substantive policy concerns and more in a partisan desire to discredit Democrats, bolster Republicans, and protect the status quo on behalf of the insurance industry.[...]

60 Senators voted to pass historic reform that will make health insurance more affordable, make health insurance companies more accountable and reduce our deficit by roughly a trillion dollars. The House passed a similar bill. However, many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate and negotiations we’ve held, the amendments we’ve added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support. We will not. We will finish the job. We will do so by revising individual elements of the bills both Houses of Congress passed last year, and we plan to use the regular budget reconciliation process that the Republican caucus has used many times.

I know that many Republicans have expressed concerns with our use of the existing Senate rules, but their argument is unjustified. There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the use of reconciliation. As one of the most senior Senators in your caucus, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said in explaining the use of this very same option, “Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so.” Similarly, as non-partisan congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said in this Sunday’s New York Times, our proposal is “compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers’ intent.”

Reconciliation is designed to deal with budget-related matters, and some have expressed doubt that it could be used for comprehensive health care reform that includes many policies with no budget implications. But the reconciliation bill now under consideration would not be the vehicle for comprehensive reform – that bill already passed outside of reconciliation with 60 votes. Instead, reconciliation would be used to make a modest number of changes to the original legislation, all of which would be budget-related. There is nothing inappropriate about this. Reconciliation has been used many times for a variety of health-related matters, including the establishment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and COBRA benefits, and many changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires. Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class. Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority. Either way, we disagree. Keep in mind that reconciliation will not exclude Republicans from the legislative process. You will continue to have an opportunity to offer amendments and change the shape of the legislation. In addition, at the end of the process, the bill can pass only if it wins a democratic, up-or-down majority vote. If Republicans want to vote against a bill that reduces health care costs, fills the prescription drug “donut hole” for seniors and reduces the deficit, you will have every right to do so.

First of the "Stupak Dozen" breaks with Stupak...

Yay.

Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a key supporter of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) anti-abortion language intended for the health care bill, said Tuesday night that he’s satisfied the Senate abortion language prohibits federal funding of abortions and will likely vote for the bill.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Not cool...

Fort McHenry is a nakedly pro-Obama as they come. But even I'm not cool with this.

Okay, so maybe Mitt Romney won't be the GOP Nominee in 2012...

Interesting notion from Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, Timothy Noah of Slate and James Pethokoukis of Reuters: it may well be impossible for former Governor Mitt Romney to win the Republican Nomination in 2012 because he's too liberal.

Romney is a useful marker in the frightening right-wing turn of his party. The GOP has been moving rightward for the last thirty years, but that shift has dramatically accelerated just since the fall of 2008. After Obama won the presidency, Republican officeholders and conservative pundits decided almost-unanimously was that the party's failure had stemmed from being too moderate.

The sudden ideological isolation of Romney is a case in point. During the 2008 GOP primary battle, he took a lot of heat for his former socially liberal positions. But his health care plan in Massachusetts attracted very little controversy. It was a classic moderate Republican plan, and one could very easily imagine Romney implementing something like it -- which is to say, something resembling the Obama plan -- had he won the presidency. Now it's seen as socialism, if not the end of American freedom. Likewise, the Bush administration and most Republicans favored TARP, but it, too, is now widely seen among Republicans as some dystopian attack on free enterprise ripped straight out of an Ayn Rand novel.

I'm not saying Romney won't try to make a run, but his odds of success with this version of the GOP are diminishing by the day. (And mind you, we haven't even touched the Mormon issue, which is going to cost him dearly among hardcore Christian Evangelicals.)

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

President Obama's Speech on the Health Reform Endgame March 3, 2010 (VIDEO)



Figured it'd be best to couple this video with a little Ezra Klein:

Obama gave no quarter today. Gone was the pretense that Democrats and Republicans basically agree on health-care reform. "Many Republicans in Congress just have a fundamental disagreement over whether we should have more or less oversight of insurance companies," Obama said. "And if they truly believe that less regulation would lead to higher quality, more affordable health insurance, then they should vote against the proposal I’ve put forward."

Gone was vague language and gesturing coyness Democrats have favored on the path forward. "The United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform," Obama said. "We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts."

So that's it, then: The health-care reform bill that Congress will vote on will be a close relative of the health-care reform bills that Congress has already passed. No Plan Bs, no starting over, no accommodation with continued obstructionism. "I have therefore asked leaders in both houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks," Obama said. "From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform."

What's important about this speech is that it didn't leave any paths open. It attacked the Republican bills, the arguments for piecemeal reform, and the idea that procedural impediments are sufficient to excuse the further delay of a verdict. This is the end of the line. There's not a magic alternative behind the curtain or a hard reset that will lead to a harmonious bipartisan process. It all just is what it is. And now it's time for a vote. It's time for health-care reform to either pass or fail.

""What you're saying is, I should take on this mess that you all created?" (VIDEO)

Sunday, February 28, 2010

F--- it, I've got nothing...

I've had my say (needless to say, I took offense). Ta-Neishi Coates has more:

I think the most charitable interpretation holds that Franks isn't endorsing slavery, as much as he's....Fuck it, I've got nothing. This is just stupid on all conceivable levels.

I think there will be some amount of indignity, and offense-taking over this comment, and that's understandable. But when I read this, as when I read many conservative politicians, speak on African-Americans, I just feel sorry for them. Before you explain to someone that a "policy" built on selling children, government-sanctioned torture, and forced labor is worse than any policy in place to day, you should come to terms with the fact that your breaths are limited, and your days numbered. You have to budget your outrage.

That is the statement of an intellectual child, of someone whose never ventured beyond their hometown. It's what happens when you decide that you're fine as the party of white people, and your corner of the world is enough. This is what happens when your knowledge is capped, and your ignorance is boundless.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Punditry...

I love these sorts of columns. By which I mean, I'd rather go skinny dipping in a bath of scalding hot razor blades than read these columns. In the end, they all boil down to the same the thing. The President is failing! And if he wants to stop failing, he'll do exactly what I want!

First off, I'd tell Nick Cohen, the article's author, to bite me. Maybe we'll back the U.K. in this new Falkland's mess (which I am keeping an eye on), and maybe we won't. I hate to sound all Republican here, but the U.S. will do what's in the U.S.'s interests. Last time I checked, y'all didn't need our help the last time this island of sheep herders cropped up as a foreign policy dilemma...

The Fireside chat for February 27, 2010 (VIDEO)

The President takes a moment to congratulate our Olympic athletes. Discussing the unity and pride Americans feel in cheering them on, the President relates that sentiment to his own desire for bipartisanship in Washington. He praises the recent bipartisan meeting and talks about moving forward on health reform.

Is Krugman's wife making him angrier???

And I mean that in the most absolute, literal, literary way...

Now, I likes me some Krugman. He tends to piss me off now and again, as I wrote back in January:

I've said it before. Krugman is a typical professor (y'know, aside from the New York Times column, New York Times blog, regular appearances on MSNBC, and...you know, the whole...Nobel Laureate thing) in that he's got a universe of knowledge in his head, and sometimes doesn't react well when people don't understand what the hell he's talking about. (Bondad clearly does). This frustration tends to show up in his writing. He also has a tendency, when really, really mad, to ignore political realities and go into "just get it DONE" mode (which Dr. Krugman is kinda in now).

Wow, have I quoted me before? I don't remember.

It looks like I was wrong. Maybe, at least according to the recent New Yorker profile on him. It looks like it was really his wife making him, well, angrier...

If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier.

Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

Friday, February 26, 2010

Slavery wasn't so bad...

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), today:

In an interview with blogger Mike Stark, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) appeared to say that African-Americans are worse off today because of legalized abortion, than they were compared to slavery.

"It seems like humanity is very gifted at hiding from something that's obviously true. I mean in this country we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say, 'Well how blind were they, what was the matter with them, you know, I can't believe, I mean four million, this is incredible,'" said Franks. "And we're right. We're right, we should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more black children, far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today, than were being devastated by the policies of slavery."

He liveth again (George Wallace edition)...

Jonathan Rauch, a Libertarian/Conservative makes the argument that Sarah Palin isn't the political reincarnation of Barry Goldwater (as numbnuts George Will suggested), but actually the political reincarnation of George Wallace...

Episode V: The Eisenhower Wing Strikes Back!

I can't claim prescience on this, since I've been reading in other news outlets and other blogs (Kos) that this might happen. But when Crist decided to start doubling down on the Stimulus, the tea leaves were there to be read.

And now, two quote-unquote independent sources claim it's about to happen.

Now, what does this mean? Simply put, I don't know. Crist is popular in Florida. He should win the General. He just can't win the Primary.

Another question is what do Democrats do? If Democrats hang together neither Marco Rubio (who has his own problems) nor Crist is going to Foggy Bottom, because they'll split the Republican vote. In fact, Crist's only sure way to victory is to run as a Democrat, but would the Democrats have him?

This seems to be like the New York 23rd, this is more about not getting "Scozzafava-ed", as opposed to making Crist the junior Senator from Florida.

More as it comes...