The woman gunning for Sen. Harry Reid's (D-NV) job doesn't believe that autism exists.
Yes, you heard right. Sharron Angle believes that the neurodevelopmental disorder know to medical science as "autism" is actually a government-backed hoax to redistribute wealth from hardworking health insurers to pesky kids and their greedy parents.
Angle was caught on tape promising to abolish mandatory insurance coverage for autism. "Everything that they want to throw at us is covered under 'autism'," Angle told the American Association of Underwriters this summer, tracing scare quotes with her fingers as she said "autism."
Care2's Kristina Chew, the mother of a 13-year-old boy with autism, responds to Angle's airy dismissal:
...By saying that you don't think there should be health care for autism, I take it that you don't think that children, and individuals, with disabilities are in need of such things-living with their families and in their communities, healthy and safe, being loved and cared for? Being treated as we would all like to be?
The fact that Angle opposes mandated coverage for private insurers should concern voters, especially since she wants to privatize all government health care programs. In other words, Angle wants to turn health care over to the private sector and stamp out public competition. And yet, Angle's campaign admits that the candidate and her husband receive both government health care and a Civil Service pension, according to Eric Kleefeld of TPM. If Angle is so morally opposed to government health care, she should set an example by declining the coverage.
Andy Kroll of Mother Jones has more on Angle's record: She once told impregnated rape victims to buck up and make "lemons out of lemonade" by bearing their attacker's child. Angle also denounced people on unemployment insurance as "spoiled."
Food vs. health care
It may soon get even harder for poor families to make ends meet. The Senate is poised to slash the extra food stamp benefits in the stimulus before they expire. The Senate already raided $6.7 billion from the the so-called "food stamp cookie jar" to bail out Medicaid and save teachers' jobs at the state level. Now they want to take even more money to fund the child nutrition bill.
The cuts would fund a marginal improvement in school lunches, notes Monica Potts of TAPPED. That's all well and good, but why provide slightly better weekday lunches if the poorest children get less at every other meal?
Annie Lowery of the Washington Independent interviews anti-hunger activist Joel Berg about the cuts. Berg says that if the cuts go through, families will have to make do with considerably less than the current $4.50 per person per day. He notes that Congress wants to cut food stamp benefits in the face of rising food prices.
When families make do with less, healthy foods like fruits and vegetables will be the first casualty. Berg argues that it is economically short-sighted to prematurely terminate one of the most efficient economic stimuli in the entire stimulus package:
And we know that we aren't only feeding people. We come at this from a moral position, a nutritional position, and an economic recovery position. This cut is so insane from an economic position as well - we know food stamps are the most effect form of stimulus. The jury is still out on parts of the stimulus - but the jury isn't out on food stamps. It was a 1,000 percent, beyond home run grand slam success, if you'll excuse me mixing metaphors. The money went to people who needed it, rapidly, and without a lot of bureaucracy.
In the Progressive, Ruth Conniff has a personal take on the politics of improving school lunches. Her kids' school got a USDA Fresh Fruits and Vegetables grant to introduce more local produce into school meals.
"Bridalplasty"
The laws of Reality TV: 1) The most important thing in life is to be very beautiful so that a man will want to marry you; 2) You have until your wedding day to make yourself look like someone else.
The E! network is launching a new reality show in which brides-to-be receive free cosmetic surgery to make them look acceptable for their Special Day, as Stephanie Hallett reports at Ms. blog. Hallett notes that armchair psychiatrists are already diagnosing the contestants with Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a condition that causes sufferers to become obsessed with imagined physical imperfections.
Hallett also argues that competitive plastic surgery shows like Bridalplasty and The Swan are dramatic exaggerations. Labeling the contestants as "sick" or "crazy" implies that they are limited-edition freaks, not individuals on the extreme end of a continuum of self-loathing that affects most women.
Ectopic pregnancy
Anti-choicers have already attacked hormonal birth control as crypto-abortion. Their next target may be lifesaving surgery for a deadly complication of pregnancy. At RH Reality Check, Lon Newman writes about a young woman that survived a life threatening ectopic pregnancy.
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg takes root outside the uterus, nearly always in a fallopian tube. Tubal pregnancies are among the deadliest gynecological emergencies because the woman can rapidly bleed to death if the tube ruptures. Obviously, once a fertilized egg takes root outside the uterus, there is no chance that it will survive. However, some anti-choice extremists still maintain that treating ectopic pregnancies is a kind of abortion.
One of the ectopic pregnancy survivor's friends actually told her that she should have respected "God's will" and refused lifesaving surgery. "I have had friends who said that I should have 'gone with God's will,' imposing their beliefs on my will to live," the woman said.
Some friend.
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.
Rand Paul, the Republican senate candidate in Kentucky, is a freewheeling libertarian. Instead of getting some fancy board-certification as an ophthalmologist, Paul decided to "go Galt" and make up his own credentials. Paul founded the National Board of Ophthalmology, ostensibly to certify doctors as qualified eye specialists.
The NBO is run out of Paul's home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Paul is the president, is wife is the vice president, and her father Hilton Ashby is the organization's secretary. Normally medical boards sponsor rigorous exams to ensure the highest professional standards in their respective specialties. "I can't tell you what the organization does," Ashby told TPM.
It takes a rugged individualist eye doctor to found an entire medical board just for himself and a few friends. When you think about it, it's kind of hypocritical of Paul to hold a standard medical license. If he were a true libertarian he'd found his own medical board and let the free market decide who's a "real doctor."
FDA cracks down on DNA tests
The mean old FDA has ordered that companies offering so-called over-the-counter DNA testing prove that their products actually work. Libertarian Alex Tabarrok is outraged. He argues that if the tests don't actually harm anyone, the government shouldn't restrict them.
At the American Prospect, Tim Fernholtz replies that the FDA's decision is just common sense. If a company is claiming to provide medical information, the onus is on them to prove that they are informing the public accurately. Besides, even if the test itself is harmless the results of the test could have life-altering consequences.
Michael Mechanic reports in Mother Jones that one woman became convinced that she'd been the victim of a hospital baby mixup when a over-the-counter DNA test showed that her son wasn't hers. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones applauds the FDA for getting involved but wonders aloud whether over the counter DNA testing is really that much different from astrology or other dubious prediction methods that are perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment. Should Magic 8-Balls be allowed to market themselves as pregnancy tests? Signs point to no.
HIV in the Motor City
Former White House staffer Van Jones is raising the alarm about HIV in Detroit, as Todd Heywood reports in the Michigan Messenger. HIV rates in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. have garnered national headlines, but the crisis in Detroit has gone largely unnoticed. Over half of the zip codes in Detroit report HIV prevalence rates of at least 3%. In the most severely affected zip codes, 6% of the population is HIV positive, an infection level on par with Uganda.
Modeling Christian behavior
A self-proclaimed Christian school in Florida fired a pregnant teacher because she admitted to conceiving her child three weeks before her wedding. Jaretta Hamilton was fired from Southland Christian School for telling the truth about premarital sex, Joseph DiNorcia reports in RH Reality Check. By all accounts Mrs. Hamilton's job performance was fine. Instead of bearing false witness, she answered an intrusive question truthfully. Apparently the school felt it was more "Christian" for Hamilton's baby to be born to an unemployed mother. Hamilton is suing for discrimination.
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.
After reading Christina Bellatoni's piece in TPM "Operation Fix The Campaign: How National Parties Help Unlikely Winners," I was confused. Do national parties need to "fix" campaigns that won? I'm no expert, but shouldn't they learn from campaigns that won? It seems to me, as a candidate, if you can beat someone who outspent you by millions with the hard work and dedication of volunteers, close friends, and family who were so inspired by you and your message that they gave up weeks and months of their time, maybe you've got a good thing going there. To me, this is like trying to sell David a RPG after he killed Goliath with his sling shot. Newsflash: The sling shot worked and you were rooting for Goliath.
Bellatoni points out that, "In such a critical election cycle where the Republicans are attempting to win back control of Congress, there's no way either party would leave a campaign up to chance." Yes, that is true. So, then why would national party committees continue to completely ignore all of the people on the ground who could help win elections. I am talking about the actual Democrats who proudly proclaim to their party affiliation and then proceed to knock on doors, make calls, and show up to vote over and over again. When those folks get their say at the polls in a Primary, then they are your best allies in the general - provided the same candidate is still running in the general election.
It looks like the DSCC has some sense of the need for the candidates to remain consistent with what got them there:
Asked specifically about Sestak, Menendez (D-NJ), said the party isn't installing people with a "cookie cutter" approach, and wants candidates to maintain their independence.
However, there is no mention of the voters, supporters, or the people who put them there. In fact, the whole article points to how the parties are encouraging campaigns to jettison people who worked for free. Really? Aren't those your most dedicated folks?
The media often characterize grassroots groups like DFA, MoveOn, or PCCC as outsiders coming in to a state to stir people up. But, as Democrats in the states know, we actually give support to Democrats on the ground who understand their states and districts and want to elect candidates who stand for something. We are simply providing some resources to the activists who care the most and who make things happen. It's amazing what they can do when they are empowered to make their own decisions. The national party could just as easily do the same.
I don't disagree that campaigns "need structure," but what campaigns don't need is DC operatives putting out the fire in the belly that got them there in the first place. Let's hope that is not the DSCC plan. Listen to the Democratic voters in the states and build your campaigns around them-they are the ones who will turn out in a midterm if you give them a reason.
A cap placed over a severed pipe is siphoning some oil from the broken BP well in the Gulf Coast, the company said today. The company's CEO said this morning on CBS that it was possible that this fix could capture up to 90% of the oil, but that it will take 24 to 48 hours to understand how well this solution is working. Adm. Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard chief and oil spill incident commander, called the cap "only a temporary and partial fix."
President Barack Obama is in Louisiana today, and BP is saying it will know in 48 hours if its attempt to "top kill" the leaking oil well in the Gulf Coast by pouring mud and cement over it has worked.
If the scramble to stop the leak has ended, the slog to clean up is just beginning. Thousands of fisherman are still out of work, as ColorLines notes. But there are new jobs in Louisiana. This week Mother Jones' Mac McClelland visited workers raking oil off a beach in Louisiana. One man, she writes, "can't count how many times he's raked this same spot in the 33 hours he's worked it since Thursday, but one thing he's sure of, he says, is that he'll be standing right here tomorrow and the next day, too."
Next moves
Although the regulatory infrastructure that was supposed to oversee companies like BP failed in this case, the administration is stepping up to ensure that the spill is stopped and the clean-up begun. "I take responsibility," the president told reporters yesterday. "It is my job to make sure everything is done to shut this down."
Kevin Drum calls this performance and the media affirmation that came after it "the kabuki of our times"-a show that only pretends that the government has the wherewithal to stop the leak without the resources of private industry.
"The president has to be In Charge whether he can actually do anything or not," Drum writes. "What everyone should be asking is not what the feds are going to do about capping the leak, but what they're going to do to make sure all the oil is cleaned up afterward."
Going forward, the government needs to make sure that BP fulfills its clean-up promises. Without strong oversight, the company could slip out of paying its debts. That's what happened last time an energy company left a lake of oil in American waters, as Riki Ott's Not One Drop documents. The book "describes firsthand the impacts of oil companies' broken promises when the Exxon Valdez spills most of its cargo and despoils thousands of miles of shore," according to Chelsea Green.
BP's behavior
BP has little incentive to clean up its operations or to take responsibility for the damage it has already incurred. As Care2 reports, another BP rig had to shut down this week when a power outage caused crude oil to spill from its storage tank to "secondary containment." And on the Hill, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) charged that the company was deliberately low-balling its estimates of the Gulf spill's size to avoid additional fines.
At The American Prospect, Monica Potts delves into the logic behind BP's operations. Even when using one of the highest estimates of the spill's volume-70,000 barrels a day, or more than 2 million barrels overall-she writes, "Americans burn about 10 times that, 21 million barrels, each day. It would only take us a couple of hours to use up everything in the Gulf. This is despite everything we know about how bad burning oil is. Given that, it's not surprising that an oil company might rank our desire for oil more highly than our undemonstrated desire to avoid ecological disaster."
Environmental obscenities
In Texas, activists tried this week to demonstrate to BP that consumers do desire to avoid such disasters, AlterNet reports. A group of women traveled to the company's headquarters and, wearing little more than sandwich boards, tried to expose "the naked truth about drill, baby, drill."
AlterNet reports that Diane Wilson, who organized the protest "doesn't take nudity lightly." Growing up in rural Texas, "I was taught that flesh is sinful, it's the devil," she said. "So for me, using nudity to expose the truth about BP was WAY outside my comfort zone. But I realized that it's the destruction of our ecosystem by corporate greed that's obscene, not a woman's body."
Real responsibility
It's important to realize that such destruction is not limited to this one catastrophe in the Gulf. As David Roberts writes at Grist:
"We don't get back the land we destroy by mining. We don't get back the species lost from deforestation and development. We don't get back islands lost to rising seas. We don't get back the coral lost to bleaching or the marine food chains lost to nitrogen runoff. Once we lose the climatic conditions in which our species evolved, we won't get them back either."
Fixing the system
If Obama is ready to take responsibility for the oil spill, he might want to focus on strengthening the government regulators who oversee these dangerous industry. The lack of oversight from the Minerals Management Service-which was rotting from the inside-out long before Obama came into office, TPM reports-played a huge role in this spill. Across the country, the government bodies that are supposed to be guarding the environment have stepped away from that responsibility.
Consider, for instance, Forrest Whittaker's report about his state's environmental oversight agency. "In decision after decision, the Texas agency that's supposed to protect the public and the environment has sided with polluters," Whittaker writes.
President Obama may not be able to fix Texas' problems, but he can provide leadership by correctly regulating corporations that pollute. In that way, the president can take responsibility not just for cleaning up this spill, but for preventing the next one.
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.
Weekly Mulch: Off-shore drilling, auto emissions, mountaintop mining from Obama administration
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
President Barack Obama announced this week that his administration would open areas from Delaware to Florida and in Alaska to offshore drilling for gas and oil. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation also released new guidelines for auto emissions to cut carbon emissions, and the EPA said new benchmarks for issuing mountaintop mining permits would prevent damage to waterways in Appalachia. The environmental community welcomed these last two announcements but both were overshadowed by the off-shore drilling decision, which green groups largely condemned.
Off-putting off-shore drilling decision
Although as a candidate President Obama began by opposing off-shore drilling, by the end of the campaign he said he would support an expansion of drilling areas. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard explains the series of decisions that made this week's announcement possible:
"In October 2008, amidst calls of "drill, baby, drill" from conservatives, Congress failed to renew the long-standing moratorium on offshore drilling. Months earlier, George W. Bush had lifted an 18-year-old executive ban on offshore drilling, which had originally been imposed by his father in 1990. Obama, of course, could have issued his own order, but didn't."
The administration had been considering the decision to go ahead with drilling for about a year but kept deliberations quiet. Key senators, however, knew the decision was coming, and it's pushing Democrats like Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) to warm towards energy legislation, TPMDC reports.
Cars' carbon emission
The EPA's announcement on auto emissions, on the other hand, comes as no surprise. It marks the first big step the Obama administration has taken to limit carbon emissions through regulation. Auto regulations are a relatively easy sell. A chunk of Congress wants to keep the EPA from taking these sorts of actions, but in this case, the auto industry supports the federal regulations. At the Washington Independent, Aaron Wiener notes that "the guidelines drew immediate praise from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which has long advocated national emissions and efficiency regulations rather than patchwork state-by-state rules."
Mountaintop removal mining
The coal industry will be less happy about the EPA's announcement on mountaintop removal mining. The agency admitted that the practice causes significant damage to streams and said its new guidelines would lead to significantly less harm.
The new policies, Jeff Biggers writes at AlterNet, will "effectively bring an end to the process of valley fills (and the dumping of toxic coal mining waste into the valleys and waterways)." It could be, he says, "the beginning of the end of mountaintop removal."
One sign that mountaintop removal's doomsday is nigh? Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), one of coal's staunchest and most powerful advocates on the Hill, praised the EPA's decision, reports Mike Lillis at the Washington Independent.
Green groups groan
Green groups are lauding the EPA's two announcements. (The Sierra Club called the mining announcement "the most significant administrative action ever taken to address mountaintop removal coal mining," for instance.) But the push for off-shore drilling has environmental advocates squirming.
"As the president extends olive branches to his critics, he's alienating allies in the environmental community, who say his policies are reminding them more and more of those of his predecessor, George W. Bush," says Mother Jones' Sheppard. "Some enviros are even likening Obama to Alaska's oil-loving ex-governor, Sarah Palin."
On Democracy Now!, Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity, called the decision "horribly disappointing" and said, "Obama is essentially embracing wholeheartedly the policy of: we can drill our way to energy independence."
The Obama administration's energy and environmental policy is creeping ever further towards the center. Ken Salazar, Secretary for the Interior, said this week that "Cap-and-trade is not in the lexicon anymore," TPMDC reports. It's no wonder that progressive members of Congress are starting to feel uncomfortable with the direction their climate bill is taking, as Sheppard reports. The president may be using up his reserves of political support from his allies as he stretches to meet conservatives and centrist Democrats on some shaky middle ground.
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.
Yesterday, President Obama signed health care reform into law. As Mike Lillis explains in the Washington Independent, the bill now proceeds to the Senate for reconciliation. The whole process could be complete by the end of the week. Republicans and their allies have already moved to challenge reform in court.
Legal challenges
The fight is far from over, however. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that Republicans have already filed papers to challenge health care reform in court. The Justice Department has pledged to vigorously defend health care reform, according to Zach Roth of TPM Muckraker.
The legal arguments against health care reform center around the constitutionality of an individual mandate, i.e., the requirement that everyone must carry health insurance. This argument is specious. The bill characterizes the mandatory payments as a tax, and imposes a fine for those who don't pay their insurance tax. There is no question that Congress has the authority to levy taxes in support of the general welfare and providing health insurance to the people easily meets that legal criterion.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent reviews some of the other formidable legal barriers to challenging health care reform in court. But take heart, teabaggers! Birther-dentist-lawyer Orly Taitz is on the case.
Violent outbursts from reform opponents
Some anti-reform activists have resorted to intimidation. Five Democratic offices were vandalized in the days surrounding the House vote, as Justin Elliott reports for TPM Muckraker. Someone hurled a brick through the window of the Niagara office of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the chair of the powerful House Rules Committee.
Slaughter is notorious on the right for drawing up the controversial "deem and pass" strategy for moving the bill forward. Her plan was never put into action, but she has become a target anyway. Another Democratic office in Slaughter's district was damaged by a brick bearing a quote from conservative icon Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice."
Elliott notes that a conservative blogger in Alabama is doing his best to incite similar attacks, though it's not clear whether he instigated any of the original five:
...Blogger Mike Vanderboegh has been tracking the breaking of windows at Dem offices after issuing a call Friday: "To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW."
Reproductive rights take a hit
Anti-abortion extremist Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) failed to get his ultra-restrictive abortion language inserted into the health care bill, but the final bill does impede health insurance coverage for abortion.
For example, those who choose abortion coverage will have to write two checks: One for their regular premium and one for a dollar to go into a separate abortion coverage fund. Many analysts fear that the extra hassles will discourage private insurers from covering abortion at all. Pro-choice activists were in a weaker negotiating position because, unlike Stupak and his allies, they weren't prepared to kill health reform if their demands weren't met.
The greater good?
Now that health care reform is safely signed into law, the pro-choice movement is stepping back and asking itself some tough questions.
In The Nation, Katha Pollitt argues that the pro-choice movement deserves to be rewarded for sacrificing its own agenda for the greater good. She suggests that the Democrats could reward the reproductive rights movement by fully funding the Violence Against Women Act, addressing maternal mortality and other policy changes to advance women's health and freedom.
Jos of Feministing counters that with their go along to get along attitude pro-choice groups have only demonstrated that they can be ignored with impunity: "You don't get rewarded for demonstrating a lack of political power, you get further marginalized."
At RH Reality Check, Megan Carpentier argues that national pro-choice organization like NARAL and Planned Parenthood ceded their leverage too easily. While anti-choicers were beefing up their lobbying presence in Washington, major pro-choice groups were scaling back. Pro-choice groups compromised early and easily, perhaps because they were overly confident that their service to the Democratic cause would be rewarded in the end.
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.
Weekly Pulse: Pelosi Makes Her Move; GOP Rep. Calls for Coup
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has laid out a strategy to pass health care reform in the next couple of days by allowing the House to vote on the details of the reconciliation package instead of the Senate bill itself. As usual, progressives are fretting that winning will make them look bad. On the other hand, conservatives are baying for blood and calling for revolution.
'Deem and pass'
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones discusses the parliamentary tactic known as "deem and pass" (D&P), which House Democrats plan to use to avoid voting for the Senate bill before the Senate fixes the bill through reconciliation. The House doesn't want to sign a blank check. If the health care bill passes the House first, there's no guarantee that the Senate will make the fixes as promised.
Originally, the hope was that the Senate could do reconciliation first. The problem is that you can't pass a bill to amend a bill that isn't law yet. That would be like putting the cart before the horse. To clear that hurdle, the House will invoke a rule that deems that Senate bill to have passed if and when the House passes the reconciliation package. It's sort of like backdating a check. Ryan Grim explains the process in more detail on Democracy Now!
D&P does not equal treason
Progressives like Kevin Drum worry that D&P will make the Democrats look bad. Meanwhile, the Tea Party crowd is calling for Nancy Pelosi to be tried for treason, as TPM reports. The bottom line is that D&P is no big deal. Republicans used the process 36 times in 2005 and 2006; Democrats used it 49 times in 2007 and 2008. D&P is constitutional. We know because it has already been upheld by the Supreme Court. Kevin Drum writes, "If you have a life, you don't care about the subject of this post and have never heard of it."
Teabag revolution
There is no joy in Tea Party Land, as Dave Weigel reports in the Washington Independent. The tea baggers are frantically lobbying to stop the bill, but the reality is starting to sink in. Their leaders are shifting from trying to kill the bill to planning the tantrum they're going to throw when it passes:
While many held out hope that plans to pass the Senate's version of reform in the House would stall out, others pondered their next steps. Some, like Rep. Steve King (R-IA), took a dark view of what might come.
"Right now, they're civil, because they think they have a chance of stopping this bill," said King to reporters, waving his arm at a pack of "People's Surge" activists forming a line to enter the Cannon House Office Building. "The reason we don't have violence in this country like they do in dictatorships is because we have votes, and our leaders listen to their constituents. Now we're in a situation where the leaders are defying the people!" Later, King would expand on those remarks and speculate on a possible anti-Washington revolt in which Tea Parties would "fill the streets" of the capital.
Sounds like King is calling for a revolution, doesn't it? As it turns out, that's exactly what he says he wants if health care reform passes. Eric Kleefeld of TPMDC reports that King is hoping for something akin to the uprising that overthrew the Communists in Prague in 1989. "Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can't get in, they can't get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people," King said in an interview with the Huffington Post.
Women and health care reform
Health care reform seems poised to pass. Amid the heady excitement, there's a sense of gloom in the reproductive rights community. Bart Stupak was defeated, but health care reform will probably end private insurance coverage for abortion.
In The American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg urges feminists to support reform anyway. She argues that the women suffer disproportionately under the status quo. If reform passes, it will insure 17 million previously uninsured women. Expanding health care coverage might help reverse rising maternal mortality rates in the United States.
A recent report by Amnesty International found that at least two women die in childbirth every day in the U.S., a much higher rate than most developed countries. The anti-choicers had the advantage because they were willing to kill health reform over abortion. The pro-choice faction did not allow itself the luxury of nihilism.
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.
You will be shocked, shocked to hear that a Blue Dog Democrat who made a career out of undermining his own party is sucker-punching them on his way out. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana abruptly announced this week that he would not seek reelection in November. Bayh's departure is ratcheting up insecurity in the Democratic caucus at the very moment they need to take decisive action to pass health care reform.
Bayh could easily have won a third term, but it's unclear whether any other Democrat can hold the seat. To add insult to injury, Bayh waited until 24 hours before the filing deadline for Democratic primary candidates, sending Indiana Dems scrambling to find a candidate to run in his place. Bayh's tardiness was calculated. Since no Democrats were ready to file by the deadline, the Indiana Democratic establishment will get to handpick Bayh's successor.
In a call with state Democratic officials, Bayh said his abrupt departure is for the best, as Evan McMorris-Santo reports for TPMDC. According to Bayh, he's doing the party a favor by sparing them a contentious primary process. Thanks a lot.
What does this mean for health care reform?
What does Bayh's departure portend for health care reform? Monica Potts of TAPPED argues that replacing a conservative Democrat like Bayh with a moderate Republican won't make that much difference. Bayh was never a reliable Democratic vote.
But Tim Fernholtz of TAPPED dismisses this view as naive. Fernholtz predicts that, for all of Bayh's faults, the senate will be much worse without him: "In essence, the difference between this insubstantial Hoosier and, say, GOP hopeful Dan Coats, is simple: You can buy off Bayh." Bayh voted for health care reform and the stimulus, no Republican, no matter how "moderate" is going to vote that way.
Anyone who expects a moderate Republican from Indiana to support any part of the Democratic agenda is deluded. On the other hand, the Senate Democrats already passed their bill, their only remaining task would be to pass a "fix" through budget reconciliation to make changes in the legislation that would be acceptable to the House. Of course, reconciliation will be a bitter political fight. One wonders whether the demoralized Senate Democrats will have the stomach for it.
About that health care summit...
Note that congressional Republicans have yet to commit to attending the "bipartisan" health care summit that they called for. Christina Bellatoni of TPMDC reports that yesterday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wondered why the Republicans were for the summit before they were against it:
"Right before the president issued the invitation, the-the thing that each of these individuals was hoping for most was an opportunity to sit down on television and discuss and engage on these issues. Now, not accepting an invitation to do what they'd asked the president to do, if they decide not to, I'll let them leap the-leap the chasm there and try to explain why they're now opposed to what they said they wanted most to do," Gibbs said.
Busting the filibuster
On the bright side, the Democrats still have a sizable majority in the Senate, with or without Bayh. Republicans would have to beat all 10 vulnerable Democratic incumbent senators in the next election in order to regain control of the Senate. The more immediate threat to health care reform and the Democrats' ability to govern in general is the institutional filibuster. Structural reform is needed to break the impasse. Lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan talks with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on strategies for busting the filibuster.
Public option resurfacing
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that four senate Democrats have thrown their lot in with progressives clamoring for a public option through reconciliation. Sens. Sherrod Brown (OH), Jeff Merkley (OR), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Michael Bennet (CO) argue for the public option in an open letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter reads:
There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach - its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option....
Big pharma's lobby
That's nice, but let's not forget who's really in charge. In AlterNet, Paul Blumenthal recaps the sorry history of collusion between the White House, the pharmaceutical lobby group PhRMA, and the Senate. According to Blumenthal the White House steered pharmaceutical lobbyists directly to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the powerful Finance Committee, who was entrusted with crafting the White House's favored version of health care reform.
Abortion and health care reform
As if we didn't have enough to worry about, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones notes that the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is making abortion is an obstacle to passing health care reform through reconciliation. The NRLC is insinuating that Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his coalition of anti-choice Democrats will vote against the Senate health care bill because it it's slightly less restrictive of abortion than the bill the House passed. The good news is that it's procedurally impossible to insert Stupak's language into the Senate bill through reconciliation. The bad news is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) needs every vote she can get to pass the Senate bill and anti-choice hardliners could be an obstacle.
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.
The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.
It appears that Landrieu was targeted, at least indirectly, because of her stance on health care reform. Two of the men posed as telephone repairmen while a third taped them with his cell phone. A fourth alleged accomplice was arrested in a car a few blocks away.
Right wing operative James O'Keefe, famous for posing as a pimp to "expose" unethical behavior at the anti-poverty group ACORN, claimed that he and his crew were trying to expose a problem with the phones at Landrieu's office which were keeping constituents from reaching her.
Constituents getting a busy signal?
O'Keefe says they wanted to embarrass Landrieu by exposing whatever was wonky about her phones, but that justification strains credulity. Defenders of the four implied that Landrieu's people might have somehow disabled their own phones to avoid angry constituents. Supposedly, these citizens wanted to express their outrage at Landrieu's decision to vote for the Senate health reform bill in exchange for a line item to give Louisiana an additional $300 million federal health care dollars.
Some callers have reported trouble getting through to their representatives. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports that members of the Tea Party movement have complained to her about not being able to get through to their members of congress. She tried calling some senators and also had a hard time getting through to a real person.
Now that he's out of jail, O'Keefe is furiously spinning his activities as investigative journalism gone awry, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. O'Keefe told Sean Hannity in an interview that these tactics were standard journalistic tools. But let's be realistic, here. Impersonating a repairman to covertly access a Senator's phones is more Watergate burglar than Woodward and Bernstein.
O'Keefe's activist theater
O'Keefe and his buddies are political operatives who come out of the world of right wing campus organizing, as Dave Weigel reports for the Washington Independent. Over the years, they've earned notoriety by using various forms of political theater and media to advance their issues. O'Keefe and Ben Wetmore, a fellow activist who let the alleged tamperers crash at his house before the Landrieu operation, even got married to each other to illustrate that shady people can marry each other for benefits, just like with straight marriage. On his now-defunct blog, Countermedia, Wetmore urged conservative activists to target seniors with a health care robocall featuring a Barack Obama impersonator.
The Landrieu crew is no stranger to more traditional forms of conservative politics, either. O'Keefe and Wetmore both formerly worked for the conservative Leadership Institute, a group that funds political training for right wing activists. Fake repairman Robert Flanagan interned for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and a GOP congresswoman. O'Keefe was revealed to be on the payroll of the right wing news site Big Government at the time of his arrest.
The Landrieu incident is a continuation of their campaign to use guerrilla video for political dirty tricks. O'Keefe became famous last year for videos that appear to show him dressing up as a pimp and soliciting questionable advice from ACORN staffers. The video touched off a panic that led to ACORN's federal funding being yanked.
Links to the intelligence community
Maybe they hoped to make the news rather than break it. The men are charged with attempting to tamper with Landrieu's phones, not just observe them. As I reported for AlterNet last week, one of the alleged tamperers has longstanding ties to the intelligence community.
In 2008, Stan Dai was the deputy director of a recruiting program for aspiring spies at Trinity Washington University. As Sahil Kapur reported in Raw Story, this program was funded by a $250,000 grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Yesterday, Laura Flanders interviewed Dr. David Price and me on GRITtv about the links between O'Keefe's crew and the intelligence community. Dr. Price is an anthropologist who studies the relationship between the intelligence community and academia. He has been keeping a close eye so-called "centers of academic excellence" funded by the intelligence community on college campuses.
Right now, most of what we know about the incident comes from a single affidavit from an FBI officer and leaks from law enforcement. We'll probably learn a lot more about the men and their motives if they go on trial.
'Very, very close' to passing reform
In other health care news, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told participants on a conference call yesterday that Democrats are "very, very close" to passing health care reform. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, who was on the call, Pelosi signaled that the House will not pass a bill until the Senate passes a list of modifications to be reinserted during budget reconciliation. Brian Beutler of TPM DC reports that progressives shouldn't get their hopes up for reviving the public option: Pelosi conceded that a public option lacks the necessary support in the Senate.
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.
So, what we might end up with is a Senate Democratic Caucus that holds 98% of its members but still fails to pass healthcare reform, AND a mob of angry progressives who are screaming for the heads of "the Democrats." This isn't fair, but more importantly, it's self-defeating. If progressives REALLY want to transform America, they'll make an issue of the anti-democratic rules of the Senate which make real change virtually impossible.
Someone around here had a crazy idea along those very lines...I would hope this is one Senator's vote liberals could count on should a filibuster reform measure actually ever reach a vote.
The House Democrats unveiled their eagerly anticipated healthcare bill on Tuesday. That's right, three key committees managed to agree on a single bill. Beltway insiders think this show of unity is a big deal. But remember, the House Dems can be expected to pass whatever legislation is put in front of them because they have a healthy majority and no filibuster. The real challenge is getting the bill through the Senate.
Progressives are demanding that Obama's healthcare reform package include a public plan, aka a government-administered health insurance option for all. A good public plan would cover more people while cutting costs and improving care. The key committees in the House drew up a bill with a public option, but the Senate is much less friendly to the idea. The real test of a healthcare reform plan is whether it can pass the Senate, as the House Dems have the votes to pass whatever health reform bill is put before them.
But not all public plans are created equal. There's a fine line between competing with insurance companies and coddling them. In the American Prospect, sociologist Paul Starr identifies potential pitfalls for a public plan. Since his days on the campaign trail, Obama scored political points by framing public health insurance an alternative to employer-based private coverage. It sounds non-threatening: If you like your coverage, keep it. If not, go public.
There's a catch, of course: Employers would get to choose to offer private health insurance as a benefit or go with a public plan.
Insurance is a boring form of legalized gambling. The whole system depends on healthy people paying into the system to cover a small minority of sick people. The higher the ratio of healthy people to sick people, the more widely the risk is spread and the cheaper the insurance will be.
Insurance companies love the employer-provided health insurance model because it's a built-in sicko filter. You're not even on their radar unless you're young and healthy enough to have a job. Employers with older, sicker employees pay more for private insurance. Starr predicts these employers will be more likely to drop their private health insurance if a public plan is available.
As a result, the sicker workers will join the unemployed and the elderly on the public plan, leaving the lucrative low-risk customers for the insurance companies. But the public plan needs a base of healthy payers in order to function as a self-sustaining insurance program.
Maybe we could overcome this obstacle if government were willing to use all its leverage to drive down costs, but most the proposals don't do that. Unless the government gets tough with vested interests, the public plan could end up subsidizing inflated healthcare costs while the private insurers make even more money.
How did employers end up providing insurance in the first place? Currently the tax system encourages employers to pay their employees in overpriced insurance instead of cash. Employees save on taxes if their employer pays for their policy, rather than giving them an equivalent cash raise. Some influential senators want to offset the cost of healthcare reform by taxing healthcare benefits worth more than a certain amount--about $17,000 per family per year, according to one proposal. So, if your health insurance was worth $17,500, you'd pay zero tax on the first $17,000 but you'd be taxed as if you'd earned that extra $500 in wages.
Organized labor vehemently opposes taxing benefits because they say it would amount to a big middle class tax hike. Even so, as Josh Holland explains for AlterNet, if the money went to fund a good public plan that drove down costs through economies of scale, the net result could be more money in the pockets of working people. Wages have stagnated but labor costs have risen, partly because employers are paying ever-increasing rates for health insurance. If employers can cover their workers for less, that's money freed up for cash raises.
All sides in the healthcare debate claim to love competition. Opponents of public options warn that government solutions will hurt healthcare by undermining the free market. However, as Josh Marshall of TPM observes, the status quo is not a free market but an oligopoly:
This won't come as the slightest surprise to those versed in health care policy issues. But I fear it's only barely permeated the health care reform debate in the country, certainly in Washington. And that's this: the opposition to a so-called 'public option' comes almost entirely from insurance companies who have developed monopolies or near monopolies in particular geographic areas. And they don't want competition.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees that despite their high-minded pro-consumer rhetoric, the health insurance industry opposes both choice and competition.
This week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) is circulating draft legislation for a nationwide, government-administered plan which would sustain itself with premiums, after an initial infusion of cash to get the program off the ground.
Under the HELP bill, unlike the House's healthcare plan, fees for healthcare providers would not be indexed to those offered under Medicare. Instead providers would be paid the average rate for a particular service based on the higher rates currently offered by private insurers. You're probably wondering: How are we supposed to save money if we lock into the same high fees that caused the problem in the first place? Good question! Medicare rates are lower because the government uses its massive bargaining power to get the best possible deal for the taxpayer. It's the CostCo principle: Buying in bulk saves money. But once again, special interest groups are refusing to let the government save our money.
Meanwhile, Sen. Kent Conrad of Senate Finance Committee is pushing for a private non-profit insurance-buying co-ops instead a public plan. The idea is that larger buying pools will be able to negotiate better deals on health insurance for their members. But if the goal is to leverage the bargaining power of a group, why stop at a co-op of just a few hundred thousand people? Why not put everyone into one huge, government-administered co-op for the best possible prices. Because, we're told, that would be single payer, or a stalking horse for single payer, and everybody in Washington knows that you can't pass a bill like that. The insurance companies and health care providers want to keep rates high.
Finally, Al Franken has officially won the Minnesota senate race. When Franken is seated, the Democrats will have 60 votes in the Senate, in theory a filibuster-proof majority. However, as Marie Diamond points out at TAPPED, the Democrats need every single senator present and voting to force cloture and break a filibuster. With Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy in failing health and Blue Dog Democrats in failing loyalty, the Dems can't take a filibuster-proof majority for granted on any given day, even when Franken is seated.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
STATE BLOGS
