This is the last part of a series of posts analyzing competitive Senate elections in blue states. It is the second section of two posts focusing on the greatest state in the union (otherwise known as California). The first part of the series can be found here.
Suburban SoCal
Southern California (SoCal, in short) is where the battle for California will be won or lost. Ms. Fiorina must accomplish two tasks in the region.
First, she must clean the clock in the suburban counties outside Los Angeles.
This is the third part of a series of posts analyzing competitive Senate elections in blue states. It will focus on California. Because California is such a big and complicated state, it will have two sections - of which this is the first. The second part can be found here.
California, Section 1
In the greatest state of the union, a fierce senatorial battle is brewing. Former HP executive Carly Fiorina is mounting a tough challenge to incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. In an anti-Democratic national environment, polls show the race close and competitive. This post will examine the obstacles Ms. Fiorina will face as she seeks to overcome California's formidable Democratic geography.
As America's most populous state, California contains a number of distinct regions. This post, and the one following, will examine each.
At Calitics yesterday, Brian Leubitz took note of widening leads for Brown and Boxer (52-43 for both) as both have done well in debates with their GOP opponents, who've come off more like debating robots than credible human beings. Which is appropriate, I suppose. But not nearly as appropriate as Meg Whitman's maid problem with Nicky Diaz Santillan. It echoed a similar event that torpedoed former GOP governor (and Whitman advisor) Pete Wilson in his now-forgotten 1996 presidential run. Following his 1994 Prop 187 advocacy, when he lost the GOP the state's Latino vote, in 1996 he lost his voice and all credibility, as it was revealed that he'd had an undocumented maid in his employ for years. It's beginning to be as predictable as Larry Craig syndrome. From the SF Bay Guardian:
Whitman calls out SF and immigrants, and karma calls back
09.29.10 - 4:25 pm | Steven T. Jones |
The gubernatorial debate highlighted stark contrasts over immigration, taxes, independence, and qualification for public office.
During last night's gubernatorial debate, Republican nominee Meg Whitman bashed "illegal" immigrants and singled out San Francisco as the state's worst coddler of those without proper immigration papers. But today, it was revealed that Whitman employed an undocumented Mexican immigrant as her housekeeper and nanny from 2000 until last year. Ah, karma, the great leveler.
After being asked what California should do about immigration issues, Democratic nominee Jerry Brown gave a reasonable answer that should have appeal to people of all political stripes, calling for halting illegal immigration by securing the border with fences and modern technology that electronically verifies the status of visitors, but bringing the state's 2 million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows by creating a way for them to achieve legal residency status.
"We can't just round them up and deport them like they did in Eastern Europe," Brown said, an incendiary analogy that was nonetheless true, reminding voters of the police state implications of the right-wing approach to the immigration issue.
Yet Whitman then essentially called for doing just that with increased enforcement, albeit with a slightly more polished approach than most angry nativists, saying the presence of "illegal immigrants" was a serious threat to California. "We have got to eliminate sanctuary cities," Whitman said, naming San Francisco as the worst culprit, and saying, "We have to hold employers accountable for hiring undocumented workers."
So should Whitman be held accountable for employing Nicandra Diaz-Santillan for almost a decade? Maybe not to legal authorities, but certainly to voters who will now question her integrity and whether she has been hypocritically grandstanding on such a politically divisive issue.
Whitman's excuse is that she didn't know her housekeeper was undocumented because she was provided false paperwork, an excuse that most California employers could also offer, showing just how ridiculous Whitman is for pretending that being "tough" can solve this "problem."
That was one of many Whitman forays into fantasyland, such as equating with "independence" a campaign funded almost entirely with her Wall Street windfalls, one she is using to advocate for aggressively cutting taxes on big business and the rich. And then pretending that's somehow a plan to close the state's massive budget deficit. Pure nonsense.
That's it precisely. It's not that the revelation by itself would have doomed Whitman. Schwarzennegar's history of violence against women did nothing to prevent his election in 2003 because press-fueled adulatory coverage made it relatively easy for him to shape the coverage. Whitman, OTOH, has had to buy her adulatory coverage herself, $119 million worth, so far, and both she and Fiorina have come up noticeably short, adopting rightwing stances that are primed to explode on them, as has apparently just happened.
Last Sunday, Robert Cruickshank (aka "Robert In Monterrey") wrote a diary at Calitics about what might seem like a minor non-event, "The SF Chronicle's Absurd Senate Non-Endorsement". However, as he showed, there was considerable significance to the Chronicle's refusal to endorse Barbara Boxer--and it's a significance that goes well beyond California:
Newspaper endorsements are of limited value, especially in high-profile statewide campaigns for major elected offices like US Senate. And yet they can sometimes frame the way a campaign is discussed, and shape perspectives about a candidate, especially when the editorial board's assessment is very deeply flawed.
And that's why the San Francisco Chronicle's decision to not endorse anyone in the US Senate race is our attention. The rationale is contradictory and ignorant of key facts, producing an outcome that lacks basic intellectual credibility.
Their basic argument is that while Carly Fiorina is an extremist who doesn't share California's values, Barbara Boxer has spent too much time representing California's values. Because Boxer wouldn't sell out California's progressive values to implement a bipartisan set of corporate-friendly policies, the Chronicle views her as "ineffective" and therefore not worthy of support.
For some Californians, Boxer's reliably liberal voting record may be reason enough to give her another six years in office. But we believe Californians deserve more than a usually correct vote on issues they care about. They deserve a senator who is accessible, effective and willing and able to reach across party lines to achieve progress on the great issues of our times. Boxer falls short on those counts.
In other words, because Boxer spent her time doing what her constituents asked and voting according to the values and views shared by a majority of Californians, she's not a good Senator? A "usually correct vote on issues they care about" is pretty damn important for most Californians, especially given the stakes in this election.
But it's not just that Boxer stands up for Californians that got the Chronicle mad - it's that she refuses to cut corporate-friendly deals.
The Chronicle rips her for not being "bipartisan" - without acknowledging what everyone who pays even a slight bit of attention to national politics understands, that Republicans are not in a mood to compromise on anything:
Boxer, first elected in 1992, would not rate on anyone's list of most influential senators. Her most famous moments on Capitol Hill have not been ones of legislative accomplishment, but of delivering partisan shots. Although she is chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it is telling that leadership on the most pressing issue before it - climate change - was shifted to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., because the bill had become so polarized under her wing.
So it's Boxer's fault that the extremist Republican Party, which now systematically denies the existence of global warming, refused to support her bill that was shaped largely on the basis of California's AB 32?
This failure to admit the extremist nature of the Senate Republicans, their unwillingness to compromise, is a huge flaw in the Chronicle's assessment of Boxer's career. They claim she cannot "reach across party lines" - but have they been paying attention these last 15 years?
The Chronicle non-endorsement is perfectly in tune with the sort of reasoning that Barack Obama advises, with almost no exceptions: any compromise is better than any fight. So you can't get Republicans to agree to an actual solution to global warming? Fine, take whatever compromise they'll give you and call it a solution.
Boxer wouldn't play that game. She tried to hold out for an actual solution. And when the GOP decided it wouldn't play that game either--that it was better for them to blow everything up, then what exactly was Obama's "Plan B"? Oh, yeah! Cut off funding to Ecuador and Bolivia!
Now that's real leadership, let me tell ya!
Barbara Boxer, OTOH: Solutions that solve things. What a concept! How rad is that?
p.s. It should be noted that the Chronicle's coverage area is one of the most liberal in California, including Boxer's home Congressional District. When talking about their own audience, Boxer is far more in tune with the people than the Chronicle could ever dream of being, politically.
They do not represent San Francisco. They represent Versailles.
Current polling from NYTimes, Democracy Corps, and several other public and private sources show a really strange paradox in this year's election cycle. On the one hand as the media is broadcasting endlessly, it is clear that people are unhappy with Congress, wanting to throw incumbents out on their ear, wanting to change course- all of which leads the punditry to declare that the Democrats are dead meat. And of course, it is impossible to forget the scary poll numbers in a lot of individual races.
On the other hand, there is a lot of other data seeming quite favorable to Democrats, and the internals in the polling make it clear there are real opportunities for gains on where we are today. Our approval numbers are better than the Republicans, although neither party is exactly thrilling people. We lead on the tax cut fight, which is the big pre-election issue; people think Democrats are more likely than Republicans to create jobs, which is the most important issue in the election; by a big margin, people think Democrats will do more to help the middle class; people even say Democrats are more likely to help small business. Apparently, even the Democratic message tying George W. Bush to current Republicans also seems to be sinking in, frankly better than I thought it would.
If it weren't for the polls showing Democrats in deep trouble, these other polls would make you think we're going to have to have a great year. What is going on?
I have two theories on this confusing mixture of polling data, neither of which is new to my writing, so please forgive the repetition if you recognize the themes from earlier posts:
1. Much of the confusion and seeming contradiction in these various data points is explained by the simple idea that I have been suggesting for about 18 months now: neither party is liked or trusted right now. You can also throw in all the tea party Republican primary victories into this explanation: voters, whether left, right, or uncertain middle don't feel like the establishment of either party is doing well by them. Voters keep sending the same message over and over again, and the Village establishment keeps missing, or ignoring, the point:
Voters didn't like the Republican establishment in 2006, so they voted in a new Congress
Democratic primary voters didn't like the establishment, so they rejected the Clintons for someone brand new
Voters didn't like the Bush team, so in 2008, they voted for someone as different from George W. Bush as you could imagine
Voters didn't feel the new guy was that much different from the old guy, and sent a message in the big New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts races so far this cycle
Republican primary voters don't like what the Republican establishment has been serving up, so they started to vote for whoever was the most anti-establishment.
This is not ideological. This is not party identity driven. This is all about the middle class seeing the American dream slip away from them, being as squeezed economically as they have been in three generations, and desperately trying to tell all politicians from every party and ideology that they want change: big change, right now.
2. The populist/reformist message that progressives have been pushing now for several months is starting to get some traction. The reason some of these poll numbers are showing signs of life and potential opportunities for Democrats in this tough as nails political environment is because Democrats are starting to finally focus in on a message that sells the idea that Democrats are on the same side as the beleaguered middle class. MoveOn's The Other 98% campaign, ads and speeches by candidates and the White House, Elizabeth Warren's appointment: the Democrats are finally starting to seem like they get it. Check out Obama's radio address and a clip of a recent speech. Check out these ads from Barbara Boxer and Robin Carnahan. Check out Elizabeth Warren's interview with Rachel Maddow. Check out this clip from Kendrick Meek. Democrats are finally- finally, finally, finally- starting to sound like the kind of progressive populists who might actually be capable of appealing to voters outside the DC Village.
Maybe it's not in time, and maybe it's not enough. Maybe voters just won't believe it at the end of the day: the skepticism is deep and wide. The President has spent far too much time sounding like Tim Geithner and not nearly enough sounding like Elizabeth Warren. But at least it is finally starting to feel like we are putting up a fight.
This is a CEO who, in the words of another right-wing Republican in the form of a former GOP presidential candidate, was too ego-driven to successfully run a company. She was a great self-promoter, but not so much on the actually getting the job done at HP thing. The board hated her, after all she was spying on some of them. The employees hated her, she laid off thousands of them, so no surprise there. And, oh yeah, the stock value of HP halved while she was the CEO.
Certainly we can agree that the last thing California needs is somebody too concerned about their own ego to focus on the very real problems we have to deal with today.
And this ad by Senator Boxer does nothing other than turning a mirror on Carly Fiorina's career. She's running as the former CEO of HP, so she has to face those facts. She was fired as CEO, and as David W. Packard, a son of one of the founders of HP, said, nobody has hired her since.
Let's not let Carly Fiorina use the Senate as a rebound gig.
It's Only Class Warfare When We Fight Back
by: Robert Cruickshank
Fri Sep 17, 2010 at 11:00:00 AM PDT
Barbara Boxer's newest ad is a damning attack on Carly Fiorina's record of destroying jobs in order to make herself richer - including enjoying her million-dollar yacht.
The ad is devastating because it shows that instead of being someone concerned about creating jobs for Californians, Fiorina is just out to make herself richer at everyone else's expense. The 30,000+ workers who lost their jobs during Fiorina's failed tenure as HP's CEO are testament to this, including those who saw their jobs sent overseas.
In short, Boxer is pointing out to Californians that Fiorina has been conducting class warfare against us for years - leading the charge of the wealthy against the jobs and basic economic security the rest of us are barely clinging to.
The Republican candidate, speaking to The Chronicle's editorial board, added: "Given that (Boxer) is choosing to play class warfare, I think it is wholly relevant that she is, in fact, a millionaire, and that she chooses to scapegoat."
In other words, it's perfectly normal and acceptable to destroy the middle class by laying them off and sending their jobs overseas so you can buy a yacht and run for the US Senate, but when someone like Boxer stands up for working people and fights to create good jobs here in California, well suddenly it's class warfare.
This is the typical reaction of the wealthy whenever anyone points out that their policies are little more than piracy, raiding our prosperity and economic security for their benefit: they react by saying we're engaging in "class warfare" merely by pointing out what is going on.
This is really all the complicated it is: An utterly failed, utter pirate (who only a clueless doofus like John McCain would choose to elevate to national political status) tries to run for high office, has the truth told about her & feels too upset for words.
She certainly has no idea what to say about Boxer. When a millionaire criticizes other millionaires for their cruel and callous behavior, she's not engaging in "class warfare". As FDR could tell you in a flash, she's being a "class traitor."
For civic ignorance alone, Fiorina ought to be disqualified from public office for life.
In fact, maybe, just like Meg Whitman, she shouldn't even be voting.
Americans don't know what to think about climate change anymore. A few years ago, the public more or less trusted the science that said human activity was raising global temperatures, but now that Congress and the Obama administration have hemmed and hawed about climate issues, we're not longer so sure.
Forty-eight percent of Americans-more of us than ever before-believe that reports of global warming are "generally exaggerated," according to a new Gallup poll. Climate science hasn't changed, so it's not crazy to look at these numbers and think that conservatives' incessant critiques of climate change may be working.
A perfect political storm
These shifts in opinion started around 2008. Aaron Wiener at the Washington Independent argues that the politics of climate change are driving American opinions about the reality of global warming. The percentage of Americans willing to put the blame for climate change on humans is about equal to the percentage of Americans still behind President Barack Obama's agenda, he notes.
"What was once a broad moral and scientific issue is now a centerpiece of the Democrats' legislative agenda," he writes.
Republicans have taken a political stand on climate change, too, one that reinforces the message that we can afford to ignore global warming. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum links the Gallup numbers to confusion about Copenhagen and to negative "Climategate" stories about a few climate scientists' unprofessional emails.
But taking a wider view, Drum points out another big problem: "The Republican Party has largely decided that climate change simply doesn't exist. It's a hoax," he says.
Green xenophobia
It's also politically convenient for a party that throws a tantrum every time the president produces a policy idea. But in another corner of the right's world, conservatives are eager to defend the country's environment against the burden of immigration.
Jamilah King reports for ColorLines that Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), which is linked to a conservative anti-immigrant group, is warning that immigration "is pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit."
King refutes this notion, citing reports that population and pollution are not directly linked. "In fact, newly arrived immigrants are probably among the most ecologically friendly folks around," she writes. "They're more likely to use public transportation and less likely to waste food."
Impacts of climate change
Conservatives who'd prefer that immigrants stay on the other side of the border would do better to worry about Republicans' studied blindness to climate change. Without action, global warming could send waves of people north, as places like Mexico grow warmer and can no longer support the same amount of agriculture.
Inter Press Service lays out some of the detrimental effects of climate change on poorer countries, particularly on the female half of the population. Women are more vulnerable to the natural disasters that accompany global warming, and the tasks that they take on, like collecting water and firewood, will grow harder as water becomes more scarce.
Overall, Thalif Deen reports, "The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men."
Slow Senate progress
The Senate is trying to move forward on climate change legislation. A key group of Senators met this week at the White House with President Obama, but coming out, the legislators had only "vague observations" to share about progress, according to Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard.
Part of the problem with the Senate's process is that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) have already said that they'll likely discard the sort of cap-and-trade provisions that the House bill used to regulate carbon emissions. From an environmental point of view, the Senate is getting close to doing nothing at all.
"It's really clear that whatever attains 60 votes in the US Senate at this stage in the game is at best an extremely incremental step forward," Gillian Caldwell, campaign director at the environmental group 1Sky, told Sheppard.
The new progressive energy
The Senate seems more eager, along with President Obama, to embrace nuclear energy as a climate solution.
"I happen to be one of the Senators who's concerned about waste," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said at a recent summit, reports TPMDC. "But most progressives in the Senate believe nuclear power is part of the solution at this time."
"If we don't expand nuclear power, there are going to be more coal plants and more oil plants," Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) added. "Nuclear power has been accepted as part of the solution [to climate change] among progressives."
Considering the political will the Senate has been able to muster behind climate legislation, one might as well believe that reports of global warming are "greatly exaggerated." After all, you'd think that if there was a potentially catastrophic threat looming in the future, our elective representatives might want to, you know, do something about that.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Ashley Ellis weighed just 87 pounds when she reported to the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Vermont to serve a 30-day sentence for "careless and negligent operation of a motor vehicle." Two days later, she was dead.
As Terry J. Allen reports for In These Times, Ashley suffered from severe anorexia and bulimia. She died because the understaffed, profit-driven prison health service contractor, Prison Health Services (PHS), failed to give her potassium supplements that kept her heart beating normally. Investigators later learned that staffers nicknamed Ashley "Potassium Girl" because she begged so frantically for her medicine.
The only health care providers on duty were licensed practical nurses who are barred by law from assessing patients. Ellis's family is considering a civil suit.
Critics say that PHS has already figured the costs of lawsuits into its business model. Unlike public institutions, corporations can just move on when the costs of their negligence become unsupportable. If Vermont fires PHS, it can move on to the next state.
Allen writes that "Vermont's serial contracts with for-profit prison health care corporations follow a nationwide pattern: Prisoners get inadequate care, contractors absorb lawsuits, states switch providers, and the conflict between profit-making and good care remains."
In other health news, the proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Senate health bill was defeated last night. Ardent pro-choicer Barbara Boxer (D-CA) killed the Nelson-Hatch-Casey amendment by calling a vote to table, as Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports. The fight over abortion funding and health care reform is far from over. Anti-choice senators might still decide to join a filibuster over the issue.
The fate of the public option is still up in the air as Democratic senators are negotiate furiously amongst themselves. James Ridgeway of Mother Jones is disappointed with the options on the table. At this rate, he predicts, the Senate will approve a public option that isn't public at all.
One popular proposal is modeled on the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which allows beneficiaries to choose between different private insurance plans under the oversight of an independent regulatory board. Some federal employees already opt out of the FEHBP because they can't afford the premiums. "This is the Democrats' idea of a 'compromise'-not with the Republicans, but with the so-called moderates within their own party," Ridgeway fumes.
At The American Prospect, Paul Starr floats a plan to minimize political backlash over the individual mandate. Under an individual mandate, everyone who doesn't have health insurance would be required to buy coverage or pay a fine. A mandate is an important part of bringing down the cost of insurance because it would force young healthy people who might otherwise be tempted to skip insurance to pay their share. But, Starr notes, health care reform is supposed to help the uninsured, not force them to buy coverage they can't afford. He proposes that those with low incomes should be exempted from the mandate if they sign a waiver that makes them ineligible for future federal subsidies for the next five years. This proposal might soften the political blow of the individual mandate, but it would seem to defeat the purpose of having a mandate in the first place. The whole point was to get people to sign up, not to make it easier for them to avoid buying insurance.
Starr's approach seems backwards. We shouldn't have to figure out how to cajole people into buying coverage that costs too much and covers too little. Subsidies and waivers won't change the ground truth: People will be annoyed when the government forces them to buy more of the private health insurers' crappy product. We know that for-profit health insurance is structurally designed to charge more and cover less. We know that premiums will keep going up if insurers don't have to compete with a public plan. Yet Democrats are converging on a plan that puts the interests of health insurers first and those of the public a distant second.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Look at that, Obama went on FOX News after all, as it was reported he would! I guess I was right, White House denials don't exactly hold a lot of water.
Anyway, on the substance of the interview (almost had to link to FOXNews.com there), there was nothing spectacular except improving FOX's ratings, although there is a nit I want to pick with him and members of Congress over the Stupak and Hyde amendments.
GARRETT: Will you sign legislation on health care that includes the Stupak language?
OBAMA: You know, I think that there is a balance to be achieved that is consistent with the Hyde amendment -- what existed before we reformed health care.
I believe in the basic idea that federal dollars shouldn't pay for abortions. But I also think we shouldn't restrict women's choices, so, I think there's some negotiations going on, not just on the Democratic side, but I think among people of good will on both sides, to see if we can arrive at something that meets that criteria and I'm confident we can do that.
This goal- essentially, we should use Hyde as our baseline and if we get back to that, all is well- was repeated by Sen. Boxer immediately after the Stupak vote:
This amendment is unfair and discriminatory toward women. It singles them out as a group and would deny women access to a legal medical procedure by dictating what a woman can do with her own private funds. We've had a compromise in place for decades that has been fair. Anything that disrupts that compromise is a huge step back for women.
What I question is why that is our goal. I understand that as an organizing mechanism, if I'm trying to defeat Stupak, I should reassure colleagues that the pre-Stupak bill won't change Hyde to get them to vote against Stupak. Fine. But there's a difference between that and endorsing Hyde as a great, sacred compromise in the public realm. Here's what they should be saying instead: "you know, Major, I think the Hyde amendment is a terrible restriction on the rights of women. But the health care reform bill without the Stupak amendment will NOT affect existing Hyde regulations." Period.
This is an opportunity to talk about how restrictive Hyde is, not endorse it, and no one is taking advantage of it- not our national pro-choice organizations, not many of the most pro-choice members of Congress. I'm not saying the votes are there to repeal Hyde. I am saying this is an opportunity to explain to Americans around the country how screwed up women's reproductive health for a huge percentage of the workforce. I didn't even know the entire federal workforce, their families, military personnel, and women in DC are denied coverage under Hyde until this vote happened. It's also an opportunity to educate the views of pro-choice members of Congress, because as Rep. DeGette told Paul Rosenberg, referring to her colleagues, "So they thought, 'Well if this is just Hyde, then no big deal.'" That is crazy that even pro-choice members of Congress would think that.
We have some work to do, and endorsing Hyde as acceptable should not be the goal.
On December 22, 2008, a retaining wall burst at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston coal-fired power plant, releasing more than a billion gallons of coal combustion waste-a volume of ash and water was 100 times greater than the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. The water flooded more than 300 acres, and the cleanup cost has been estimated at over a billion dollars.
There are 44 coal combustion waste sites nationwide that EPA has identified as posing a "high hazard", but on Friday, Senator Barbara Boxer said in a press conference that the EPA says the locations cannot be released to the public--although it has notified local officials, including first responders.
EPA's refusal came after consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security. Boxer praised the EPA for it's swift action in collecting the information, but strongly criticized the refusal to make the information public:
However, I am concerned that the EPA, after consulting with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security, has indicated that they cannot make the list of "high hazard" sites public.
We are pursuing whether the handling of these sites is consistent with the handling of other similar facilities, because of the critical importance of the public's right to know about threats in their communities. If these sites are so hazardous and if the neighborhoods nearby could be harmed irreparably, then I believe it is essential to let people know.
In that way, they can press their local authorities who have responsibility for their safety to act now to make the sites safer.
This sort of secrecy was SOP under Bush/Cheney. Is it yet more "change we can believe in"?
This sort of Cheneyesque action has become so routine it's like it's not even eyebrow-raising any more. Of course, there's not just a public right to know issue here. There's also the fact that people alerted to such dangers could help contribute to grassroots opposition to further bogus "clean coal" scams, and the like. So it really raises questions about who's responsible for such decisions, and what sort of corporate or industry connections they might have.
So it's a lazy Sunday, and the Presidential race looks like it'll come down to environmental factors. I put up a post about four months ago (can't find it now) in which I basically echoed the thesis that Obama would win if the economy melted down prior to the election, but would only probably win if it didn't. I'm not good at predicting electoral outcomes, and despite giving out mounds of advice, I don't believe in backseat strategizing. I think you execute based on what you know, and that the Obama team has done. Given the financial crisis, this strategy is doing just fine - the country wants a steady centrist hand on the tiller. And now the 60 vote threshold in the Senate is possible, with Liddy Dole 'certain' to lose according to McCain officials and McConnell getting pounded in the polls.
So what does this mean? Well, I don't really know, but I'm going to assume that the Senate, as the most conservative institution on our Federal level, will be a major breeze to the right in terms of health care, trade agreements, civil liberties, economic justice, etc. Let's then examine the playing field for 2010; the environment for 2010 is unpredictable and probably chaotic, with a sharp recession on its way and a credit crisis here now.
I'm particularly interested in possible primaries to the Democrats, the party that the lobbyists are going to fete repeatedly and intensely in 2009 and 2010, much to our chagrin. I'm sure there will be retirements, but here's the list of Democrats up for reelection.
Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said that "he is innocent until proven guilty." Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens's ability to work in the Senate.
Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.
Question: How hard is it to say 'An indictment is a serious matter, though I can't comment specifically because I haven't seen it'? Answer: Not very.
Something serious is rotten in DC.
UPDATE: I'm reading the comments, and people are defending this crap. Have you not been watching war funding, FISA, Lieberman-Warner, Countrywide scandals, the Housing bill, the Wall Street bailout, oil subsidies, the Energy bill, the endorsements of Joe Lieberman in 2006, the Alito confirmation, etc?
The Senate is a damn club. I'm not saying these are bad people, though some of them are, just that they are part of a rotten system that compels them to make immoral choices. They deserve criticism for it, they are the MOST empowered parts of society. The sooner we learn this the sooner we can start to fix it, but if you keep denying that these people are part of a corroded system it won't get better. We're supposed to be smart activists, not blind obedient morons following elitist DC Democrats off a cliff.
Is everyone that comments part of the 9% of the country that approves of Congress? Do you realize how out of touch you are when you defend this kind of behavior? Don't you see that when you cheer the Bush Department of Justice and excuse the enabling Democrats in the Senate you are part of the problem?
Update again: And Inouye held a fundraiser for Stevens earlier this year. Ah, postpartisanship.
Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions. The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).
"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said....
"Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.
[H]ere's a proposal to inspire a transformational focus by our candidates. On every issue, with every group of activists, politicians who claim to be doing transformational work should be required to prove it. All politicians who seek your support should produce articles, videos, transcripts--anything that demonstrates that they are challenging the conservative assumptions that frame virtually all discussions of public policy among America's elected officials. How do we talk about abortion? As a duel between "prochoice" and "prolife" extremists--or as an issue of basic human freedom for women denied the power to control their own bodies? What do we say about health insurance? That it requires a delicate balance between the free market and socialism--or that it is an essential investment in our most important national resource and a basic right, without which our commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is meaningless.
The key here is to measure a candidate's progressive transformational potential not by his or her voting record on a checklist of policy issues, but to what degree that candidate is willing to challenge conservative frames themselves. I'm not sure if we have such a linguistic wordsmith either in Congress or as a sitting Governor, but I can think of one politician who has consistently pushed the envelope and engaged in actual fights--often successfully--on subjects that no other Democrat would touch. That person is Senator Russ Feingold.
From narrowly winning re-election in 1998 despite rejecting "soft" money from the DCCC and eventually passing campaign finance reform into law, to being the lone vote against the Patriot Act and leading a coalition to block a renewal of the law as is four years later, to becoming the first Senator to propose a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq before such a bill passed the Senate two years later (not to mention for over 60% of the country to come to agree with that position), to offering a censure motion against President Bush, to working with Chris Dodd to block telecom immunity, by personal filibuster if necessary, no other Democrat in the Senate even comes close to Feingold's consistent willingness to pick seemingly unwinnable fights, push the envelope, and eventually turn a minority of one into a majority position nationwide. Simply put, no one else does this. Once and a while Boxer (on election integrity in 2004), Dodd (who seems to be growing in this capacity) or someone else will pick a fight, but truth be told Feingold is a one-person progressive movement and progressive transformation in the U.S. Senate.
Over time, we need to build a bench and a nexus of power around an entire group of transformational progressives in Congress. In the short term, if we want such a figure to become the face of the future Democratic Party once Barack Obama (almost certainly) becomes the Democratic nominee and then (hopefully) the next President, Feingold is arguably the only available option. Chris Dodd, Sherrod Brown, Barbara Boxer... maybe. However, for quite a long time Russ Feingold has been the one and only consistently transformative progressive in the U.S. Senate.
I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Using the criteria presented above, what other Democrats have demonstrated a broader commitment to progressive change through their words and through their fights? Those are the leaders we need to identify and work with, and hopefully one of those leaders will find his or her way into the Democratic ticket this year. We need to go beyond checklists: who has talked the talk, and then walked the walk?
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