Dispatches from the Flying M

Whitehouse tells it like it is

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) puts, in better terms than I could, why some form of health care legislation has to pass.  As he says, "When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea, when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is, and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth."

The Senate Dems have passed the cloture vote now.  They just have to pass the bill, which is a foregone conclusion at this point, then send it to conference, which is where it gets tricky.  I generally side with the progressives on the substance of the bill, but with the realists on the necessity of passing some bill, however imperfect, rather than no bill in the quest for perfection.

You can read the Hofstadter essay that Whitehouse quotes from in full here.

(Still) more on health care reform

Apparently many people are weighing in on the topic du jour.  Here's an op-ed in the Washington Post from VIckie Kennedy, who says: "Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have been done a long time ago. He predicted that as the Senate got closer to a vote, compromises would be necessary, coalitions would falter and many ardent supporters of reform would want to walk away. He hoped that they wouldn't do so. He knew from experience, he told me, that this kind of opportunity to enact health-care reform wouldn't arise again for a generation"

VP Joe Biden has one in the New York Times.  Biden: "If I were still a United States senator, I would not only vote yes on the current health care reform bill, I would do so with the sure knowledge that I was casting one of the most historic votes of my 36 years in the Senate. I would vote yes knowing that the bill represents the culmination of a struggle begun by Theodore Roosevelt nearly a century ago to make health care reform a reality. And while it does not contain every measure President Obama and I wanted, I would vote yes for this bill certain that it includes the fundamental, essential change that opponents of reform have resisted for generations."

Finally, although it would be a complicated task, I'd be willing to bet money that there's a team of Wal-Mart executives meeting this week trying to figure out if there's a place in the health insurance business for them.  With virtually every American compelled by law to buy insurance, it's going to be big business for the indefinite future.  While it would still have to work through every state's laws, if they could put together some sort of semi-national, low cost plan--doing for health insurance what they did for meds with their low-cost generics, basically--they could create a de facto public option that would earn them a small profit and, like their drug plan, haul yet more consumers through their doors to be tempted by cheap, Chinese-made crap.

It might almost be worth going to Wal-Mart for.

Christmas spirit and the law

It's not specifically a Christmas story, but if you need a reminder about human generosity--and a reminder to appreciate the men and women in blue (or khaki or whatever) who work so hard to keep us safe from ourselves, give this a read.  And thank a cop.

Health care reform, #745,212 of a continuing series...

If I had a functional voice, I would have laughed out loud at the conservatives this morning on This Week with George Stephanopolous.  George Will and "Dishonest Jon" Kyl were both suggesting that it would be a bad idea, politically, for Senate Democrats to pass their health care bill because the latest polls show that it's unpopular (although just barely). 

A couple of weeks ago, of course, and for the last many months that this issue has been debated, these same people were counseling that the polls meant nothing--because until the latest round of polling, health care reform has been extremely popular with the majority of the American people.  The reasons that it's not today are simple--conservatives have never liked it, to a great extent because their spokespeople and pundits in the media have lied to them about what's in it.  Democrats and independents continued to support it (and, I expect, still support the House version) because it includes a public option, which is the key to genuine competition and cost-cutting.  Even after the public option went away but was replaced by a Medicare buy-in, the support remained.  Only when both those elements went away did support collapse on the center and left.

So what's left is a bill that few people can love, except for the Senators voting for it and the insurance company execs who will profit from it. It's a bill that enshrines in the protection of law the idea that only private companies can provide health insurance, and everyone has to buy their products.  Although there's some stricter regulation, in the long run the 31 million more customers (and government subsidies) the insurance industry picks up more than outweigh the inconvenience of having to, say, actually provide the health insurance they offer.

The right wing's hypocrisy is also amply illustrated by their insistence that the bill contain some sort of restriction on abortion.  The fact is that abortion is a legal medical procedure, and any legislation making it more difficult is, in absolute terms, "the government coming between doctor and patient."

Still, while it's a long way from perfect, the Senate bill seems to contain some good things among the bad, and although in some respects it pains me to do so, I think I have to support its passage (I'd like to think it'll be improved in conference with the House, which produced a much better bill, but I think the problem remains the same--an improved bill won't pass through the recalcitrant conservative Dems, and the Lieber Man, in the Senate).

But it's a framework upon which much can be built.  If it fails, then we'll go another generation with the certainty that health care reform is politically impossible.  If it fails, then the Democrats will take their (rightful) lumps as being unable to govern, even with 60 votes in the Senate.  And it won't come back up for a very long time, during which countless millions more will die and declare bankruptcy and otherwise have their lives ruined by a health care system that's by far the most expensive in the world.

With this framework in place, though, a kind of warning shot will have been fired over the bow of the insurance companies.  We're willing to work with you, it says--but you have to understand that you'll be regulated.  If you continue to play fast and loose with the lives of your customers, that regulation will be tightened, as it has been, say, with tobacco companies.  We'll be fiddling with the mechanics, trying to make it right, rather than starting from scratch.  If insurance companies still fail to come through, a public option added to this new framework will seem less radical.

It's still a long way to single payer from here.  But it's moving in the right direction. I'd hate to see that movement shot down now.  If this passes and becomes popular with the people, then further reform becomes that much easier.

UPDATE: It also occurs to me that, while there might be some short-term political fallout for passing this flawed bill on a strict party-line vote, what it really illustrates is that to actually govern, a majority needs to have more than 60 votes.  If the Senate had 65 or 66 Democrats, then the conservative handful couldn't have blocked real reform.  With 60, each Democrat has too much individual power, so a Nelson or a Lieberman can prevent progress.  Throwing some Dems out of office will only bring back absolute gridlock--what we need to do is throw some obstructionist Republicans out and elect enough Dems to marginalize the votes of the few who vote like Republicans.

Truer words...

...have never been spoken.

"I don't know what's happening here in this body, but I think it's wrong." --John McCain.

I'm sure that sentence could apply to just about any situation in which John McCain finds himself, especially the first part.  In this particular case, he was talking about Al Franken preventing Joe Lieberman from rambling on over his allotted time (because Franken was under strict instructions not to let anyone exceed the allotted time, what with Christmas coming up and all). But I'm pretty sure McCain almost never knows what's happening at any time, which in no way prevents him from having an opinion about it.

Two thoughts on this:

1) Anytime McCain opens his mouth and expects his judgment to be taken seriously on any issue, all I see is a big flashing PALIN sign over his head.

2) I think we should work on having the Lieber Man replace the Boogey Man as the scariest thing in our culture. Next time your kids won't mind, threaten them with a visit from the Lieber Man. That'll put 'em in their place!

Go, Al!

What does it say about the Senate that Al Franken is suddenly one of the best senators we've got?  Maybe he just hasn't been there long enough to have the spirit crushed out of him. It's astonishing to watch John Thune simply repeat a lie he's been called on as if everyone around him can't hear the words coming out of his mouth.

Is Joe Lieberman mentally ill?

There's a certain sort of pundit--Charles Krauthammer foremost among them, and as a psychiatrist he really should know better--who gets a certain kick out of pretending to examine the mental state of people with whom he disagrees politically.

I don't tend to like that kind of punditry. People can have different viewpoints and not be insane. They simply believe different things, and starting from different points they wind up at opposing conclusions.  Simple.

Joe Lieberman, though...I'm no longer so sure about Joe.

Throughout the long health care debate, he has continually moved the goal posts.  He's held out the threat of filibuster again and again.  Each time the Democrats in the Senate agree to change the bill in order to accommodate his wishes, he changes his mind again.  Most recently, he objected to the public option.  But he had been in favor of expanding the pool of people eligible to buy into Medicare, so fine, the Dems ditched the public option in favor of an expanded Medicare. Now he's opposed to that which, three months ago, he was in favor.

His problem is either A) he's utterly dishonest, but afraid to say that he just doesn't want health care reform under any circumstances--despite the fact that a majority of his constituents do--because of the big donations he gets from all those insurance companies in Connecticut, or B) he really has lost his mind, and he can't keep track of his own beliefs, and simply uses what the Democrats are in favor of to define what he opposes.

Either way, CT voters should make sure this is his last term in the Senate, since he's clearly thrown them under the bus.  And the Democratic leadership should strip him of every perk he's been given since he "agreed" to caucus with the Democrats, since he clearly did not make those negotiations in good faith.  Honest Joe Lieberman is a liar and a fraud.  But I hear there's a fine office in the Capitol basement, next to the boiler...

Arpaioland

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to make himself look like an evil despot, even as he considers running to replace unelected Jan Brewer as Arizona's governor.

Now he's accusing a judge of various crimes, without offering any evidence whatsoever, apparently because he doesn't like the fact that said judge has ruled against him in various ways.  He has not only managed to bring a halt to a hearing the judge has ordered, but because of his accusation (in tandem with a County Prosecutor), the judge himself will have to appear at a hearing to defend himself against "crimes" for which there's no evidence.  It's hard to prove a negative, which is why the burden of proof is supposed to be on the prosecution.  But you don't need to prove anything to create a negative image of someone, and that, time and time again, is what Arpaio does.

If he runs for governor and you live in Arizona, don't forget this kind of behavior.  Considering all the crap he pulls now, imagine what he'd be like running the state.  We might not have seen his kind since Huey Long.

Obama's Nobel speech

I would rather be in Arizona this morning than in Copenhagen, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't have enjoyed seeing President Obama deliver his Nobel peace Prize acceptance speech. Admitting to the awkwardness of accepting it even as the head of state of a country embroiled in two wars, one of which he's ramping up, he talked about the occasional necessity of war. But in a bigger context, he talked about the ways in which war might be avoided, in which we can and should strive to live in a world where peace and respect for human rights are our goals.

Here's one passage I thought was crucial:

"Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All of these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, or the staying power, to complete this work without something more - and that is the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share."

The "continued expansion of our moral imagination."  That's a great phrase; one I can't imagine his predecessor using, or understanding, but it's a powerful idea.

He ended the speech with this:

"So let us reach for the world that ought to be - that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. Somewhere today, in the here and now, a soldier sees he's outgunned but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, who believes that a cruel world still has a place for his dreams.

"Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that - for that is the story of human progress; that is the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth."

He wrote most of the speech himself, and given his skill with delivery, I can only imagine that watching it would have been an impressive sight.  I'm sure it's online; I'm also sure that watching it online would kill my satellite for the next 24 hours.  Besides, a computer screen is not the same as seeing something in person.

You can read the full text here.  I recommend it.

Tiger balm

I don't play much golf anymore, except the occasional round of wilderness golf across the wild acreage here at the ranch.  But I still enjoy watching it on TV sometimes, and more than anything I love to watch Tiger Woods. When he's at the top of his game, it's inspiring--it's like watching Warner and Boldin's incredible sideline pass/touchdown in Sunday night's game against the Vikings.  There are feats of physical skill that they should be impossible, or at least highly improbable, and when you see them it's a remarkable thing.  Tiger's been able to do more of those than any golfer in the history of the game--at least, in the history of the televised game.

These days, or course, all people talk about it Tiger's sex life.  Admittedly, I haven't paid a lot of attention to his personal life.  He plays golf well, and that's what I watch.  I don't know much about his marriage, and now I know more than I ever wanted to.

But I'm not necessarily a believer in monogamy for its own sake.  I think the participants in a marriage should get to decide what the rules of their marriage should be, and the rest of us should keep out of it. If Tiger and Elin Nordegren had an agreement that their marriage should be monogamous, then apparently Tiger's a skunk.  If they didn't, then maybe his worst crime is not being as careful and discreet as he should have been, assuming he wanted to keep his sex life out of the news.  I don't understand why people having illicit affairs would send text messages in the first place, or leave voice mails...

If Tiger and Elin should divorce over all this, I'll feel bad for their kid. Elin will walk away from it young, beautiful, and very, very wealthy.  Tiger might be slightly inconvenienced, and even lose some endorsement deals, but he's already earned over a billion dollars so he'll be fine financially and professionally.

As far as I know, though, Tiger has never set himself up as an abiter of morality or marital rectitude. If he had, if he's been hypocritical in addition to promiscuous, then that would knock him down a few pegs in my book.  Take, for example, former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton (and is that his real name, or his porn name?). He has been accused of severely beating a sex partner during an S&M session because she didn't say "green balloons," their agreed safe word--but she says she didn't say it because he apparently spiked the drink he served her. Since she was unconscious during playtime, she was in no position to remember or speak the safe word.  I don't even mind Rod's taste for S&M, but since he's also the guy who's been fighting for years to keep gay sex illegal in Missouri, that jumps right off the cliff of hypocrisy.  You can have any kind of sex you want, Rod, but gay people can't?  

People's intimate lives should be their own business--it only becomes our business if they want to make it their business and then get caught in their own nets of stupidity. Tiger should get back to playing golf, and Jetton should...well, apparently he should just shut up.