There has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the past day or so as those who follow the healthcare debate react to the Stupak/Some Creepy Republican Guy Amendment.
The Amendment, which is apparently intended to respond to conservative Democrats' concerns that too many women were voting for the Party in recent elections, was attached to the House's version of healthcare reform legislation that was voted out of the House this weekend.
The goal is to limit women's access to reproductive medicine services, particularly abortions; this based on the concept that citizens of good conscience shouldn't have their tax dollars used to fund activities they find morally repugnant.
At first blush, I was on the mild end of the wailing and gnashing spectrum myself...but having taken a day to mull the thing over, I'm starting to think that maybe we should take a look at the thinking behind this...and I'm also starting to think that, properly applied, Stupak's logic deserves a more important place in our own vision of how a progressive government might work.
It's Political Judo Day today, Gentle Reader, and by the time we're done here it's entirely possible that you'll see Stupak's logic in a whole new light.
is Countdown's Free Clinic partnership events shaping up. I honestly don't know if they can pull this off fast enough to make a difference in the short term, soon enough to win the battle in this go-round. But this is the sort of thing we need to start seeing in terms of changing the whole zeitgeist. The contrast between these mass events of public healing and the jackassery of the tea-partiers should be particularly striking.
It took a couple of years of this sort of thing to build up the momentum for the really big stuff during the New Deal, so I think that if we focus on building strength, and pulling off events like this, our strength will only increase in the years ahead. Maybe not the Conservadem's, but they're really not my concern. And since Obama loves them so much, he's not my concern, either. He will come to us when there's nowhere else to go.
I want to be clear, I'm not giving up on us getting a decent bill this year. But I think that if we take a longer view--and don't buy the Versailles CW that it's got to be now or never--then we'll be much better prepared to hang tough in the short run, and not fold. And that's what's needed to win.
Don't get me wrong--I want health care reform to pass this year. But I want us to be both as clear and strong as we possibly can be. And I want to draw a very clear distinction between the logic of Versailles and the Democratic leadership, and the logic of progressive Democrats out in the wilds of America.
Inside Versailles, there can be no doubt--if the Democrats don't pass health care now, it will be dead for another decade or more--and so will the Democrats. There can be no doubt about this, just as there could be no doubt that Iraq had WMDs, and that Bush's election in 2004 signaled the consolidation of a permanent GOP governing majority.
In other words, it's pure and utter crap. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won't. Nobody knows for sure. But we do know what follows from assuming that it's true: a wholly uncalled-for degree of Democratic paralysis. In virtually all other walks of life, what's more American than saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"?
But when it comes to health care reform, we're supposed to stand and salute the proposition, "Take anything you can get--brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hot dog--and call it a victory, no matter what." Could there possigbly be a more cowardly, unimaginative, downright un-American fore-ordained loserattitude than that?
Political Poison: None For Me, Thanks...
Furthermore, if we recognize the obvious--that an individual mandate forcing people to buy private crapolla insurance is pure political poison, then how can we not be willing to see health care "reform" die this year, rather than pass such a suicidal bill into law?
As Digby wrote, regarding individual mandates, and potential Constitutional challenges:
Reform advocates will undoubtedly look back on all this and wonder if the politics of single payer would have actually been easier. In this particular respect, it almost certainly would have been. There's no doubt that the federal government has the power to tax for certain benefits or compel payments to outside parties for certain optional privileges (like driving.) But whether it has the power to compel all citizens to pay money to particular private interests is an unknown. Who knows what the Roberts Court will decide on that?
Of course, if a public option is in place it's a different argument altogether, isn't it?
Sigh! None of this would have happened if only we'd had a constitutional lawyer as President!
I don't think that it needs to come to this. In fact, I think that being willing to let health care reform die may well be the key to ensuring that it doesn't. "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." -- So wrote Goethe, and he was absolutely right. The converse of that is, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." And that's become the Democrat's de factor operating script ever since 1994.
After 14 years of operating out of fear of failure, isn't it time we started operating out of hope of success?
At the very least, can't we just stop trying to out-stupid the Republicans? Because in that game, even when you win, you lose.
A new study (prepublication draft here) by Harvard researchers finds that lack of insurance is responsible for about 45,000 deaths per year. This is the equivalent of the ninth-leading cause of death according to CDC statistics--none of the others of which can be reduced to zero by a simple act of Congress. A 1993 study put the figure then at 18,000 deaths annually. The new study was an update of the earlier one.
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year - one every 12 minutes - in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.
The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats' efforts to reform the nation's $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs.
BTW, using the EPA's standard valuation for a human life, $6.9 million, that works out to an annual cost of $310.5 billion--about 1/8 (12.5%) of the total 2.5 trillion spent on health care.
On Friday, guest host Lawrence O'Donnell began Countdown's healthcare coverage by reporting on the findings:
Unfortunately, O'Donnell didn't stay focused on the report for long, but it was the introductory frame he used.
The Apologetics are emerging en force this week, and one worth noting is Phillip Zelikow who published his attempts at self-justification over at the Foreign Policy Magazine's "Shadow Government" blog.
Unfortunately Mr Zelikow's style tends toward the very dry and impenetrable sort that pervades official Government policy presentations, like, say, the 2002 National Security Strategy, which he, along with Condi Rice and Stepehn Hadley authored and which forms the basis for his assessment of Bush's Legacy, so it's very difficult at first to for laymen as such to figure out what the fuck he is trying to say. Much easier to just sort of nod to the awareness that Bush did have a profound impact on foreign policy, point out that most of it sucked but that there is some plausible argument that some points of his policy did OK, maybe, and walk away.
But Zelikow's position is such that, when he says "What Bush Got Right," and then proceeds to frame the analysis around the policy documents he crafted, he's essentially saying, "What I, Phillip Zelikow, Got Right," and so walking away actually entails letting this man win the argument that "The Bush Doctrine"lead to some positive outcomes.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my experience at the BlogWorldExpo political panels, and noted the alarming moral degeneracy among the conservative attendees. I was helped in this by the notes taken by K T Cat. He made my point for me by condensing several examples of this government's behavior (warrantless wiretapping, shredding the Constitution, going to war on lies, etc.) that I find more offensive than words for sex and body parts into the dismissive phrase "Bush administration policies," then promptly declaring that sexual attitudes should be the top priority of society.
Right. Because when your fellow citizens are being made homeless by the perfidy of our banks and financial institutions or remaining homeless because the Bush administration abandoned the poor of the Gulf Coast, or are living in debt peonage, or when police violence and impunity continues to escalate across the nation, or while the country is being bled dry to feed Halliburton, Bechtel, CH2M, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater, that's the time to rail against the horrors of one of our species' most basic biological urges. Unless it's time to rail against the horror of knowing that you helped pay for a kid's bone marrow transplant, which ought to make you mad, for some reason.
Which is no better than the ignorance displayed by someone in the audience at a Friday panel at Blog World, from the near unnavigable site Democast, who insisted that the Tamil Tigers were just another example of a dangerous Muslim group bringing fascism to the world, after I mentioned that they were the original suicide bombers. But as I'd said, the Tamil Tigers are a nationalist movement, spurred by the racist policies of a Sinhalese government instead of religion, and they happen also to be Hindu. Not Muslim. Not Arab. Tamil Hindus. Kind of puts a damper on blaming all the ills of the world on the Scary Islamic Jihadis.
Wingnuts. They'd almost be cute if their leaders hadn't seized control of the government by means of vote fraud and a corrupt court. Also, if they weren't so racist. Really dampens the charisma potential.
Yesterday, discusson of my post on Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine took an unexpected turn, with accusations that Klein was peddling some sort of conspiracy theory. It took me too long, really, to post a link along with some excerpts from an interview with Chip Berlet that explained just what conspiracy theories are, so that it would be clear that Klein wasn't doing anything of the sort.
But beyond the confusion about the nature of conspiracy theories, I saw something deeper at work--a distrust of the creative, artistic expression involved in the short film promoting Klein's book. This sort of distrust is quite widespread. It is, in part, a distrust of what cannot be rendered into cold hard factual arguments, at least the way that we define them. We can see it in the legions who dismiss George Lakoff without ever actually having read him. It is also, in part, a longstanding distrust between the political and the cultural left. And that made me think of a short article I wrote for my paper back in 2002. Because, you see, there are very important truths that can best--if not only--be told in the form of stories, which is to say, true lies.
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