Joe Klein: Iraq Shudders
I meant to post on this a few days ago, but the arrest of a key leader of the Sunni Awakening Councils in Diyala province is not a good sign. Diyala, which is located just northeast of Baghdad has been one of the toughest provinces to calm over the past two years, in part because it is not pure of sect--the Sunnis represent a significant minority. Diyala is, then, a crucial test for the Maliki government's effort to reintegrate Sunnis into the government...and there are far too many indications that Maliki is failing in Diyala and elsewhere.
I'd suspect that a good part of the rising body count in Iraq is being orchestrated to coincide with the planned departure of U.S. troops from the major cities, which is to take place over the next month. But there is a growing danger that Iraq could backslide into civil war--not just between Sunni and Shiites, but between Arabs and Kurds--if Maliki doesn't start making a more determined effort to reunite his country.
Krugman: Blue Double Cross
'Borderline' torture OK'd? May 21: According to a new report, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved "borderline torture" months before the now infamous Justice Department memos authorizing torture. Could this be true? Rachel Maddow is joined by NPR Justice correspondent Ari Shapiro.That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda.
So here’s the question: Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what’s happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation? Or will he honor his own pledge, made back during the campaign, to go on the offensive against special interests if they stand in the way of reform?
The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care, including the American Hospital Association and the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.
The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. “For too long, politics and point-scoring have prevented our country from tackling this growing crisis,” it said, adding, “The American people are eager to put the old Washington ways behind them.”
But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised — that it had made no commitment to the administration’s goal of reducing the rate at which health care costs are rising by 1.5 percentage points a year. And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to “ramp up” savings, whatever that means.
Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies. And at least some insurers are gearing up for a major smear campaign.
On Monday, just a week after the White House photo-op, The Washington Post reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina was preparing to run a series of ads attacking the public option. The planning for this ad campaign must have begun quite some time ago.
The Post has the storyboards for the ads, and they read just like the infamous Harry and Louise ads that helped kill health care reform in 1993. Troubled Americans are shown being denied their choice of doctor, or forced to wait months for appointments, by faceless government bureaucrats. It’s a scary image that might make some sense if private health insurance — which these days comes primarily via HMOs — offered all of us free choice of doctors, with no wait for medical procedures. But my health plan isn’t like that. Is yours?
“We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system,” says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that’s true, why don’t you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it’s really that bad?
For none of the reform proposals currently on the table would force people into a government-run insurance plan. At most they would offer Americans the choice of buying into such a plan.
And the goal of the insurers is to deny Americans that choice. They fear that many people would prefer a government plan to dealing with private insurance companies that, in the real world as opposed to the world of their ads, are more bureaucratic than any government agency, routinely deny clients their choice of doctor, and often refuse to pay for care.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama.
Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.
But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ”
The question now is whether he really meant it.
The medical-industrial complex has called the president’s bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity.
It’s up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.
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Mid-day yesterday, I noticed that Mark Halperin had a headline that read, "Round 2: Liz Cheney vs Axe." Round 1, apparently, was President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, and Round 2's "Axe" refers to David Axelrod, Senior White House Advisor to the president.Josh Marshall: A-Team?. GOP sends Newt on to Meet the Press to debate Dick Durbin.Halperin added, "The two surrogates weigh in on the Cheney vs. Obama debate shortly after their speeches in MSNBC interviews. Must-see video...."
Notice the problem? Liz Cheney was brought on to offer analysis of her own father's speech, and parrot her dad's criticism of the president. (What a surprise -- she found her dad's argument very persuasive.)
What's more, as part of a full-throated defense of her dad's torture policies, Liz Cheney has been all over the television news. I asked my friends at Media Matters to check on just how many interviews Cheney has done lately. They came up with this list that spans the last 10 days (and today isn't over yet):
* On the May 22 edition of ABC's "Good Morning America"
* On the May 22 edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe"
* On the May 22 edition of CNN's "American Morning"
* On the May 21 edition of CNN's "AC360"
* On the May 21 edition of Fox News' "Hannity"
* On the May 21 edition of "MSNBC News Live"
* On the May 20 edition of Fox News' "Your World"
* On the May 17 edition of ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"
* On the May 16 edition of Fox News' "Fox & Friends Saturday"
* On the May 15 edition of Fox News' "On the Record"
* On the May 12 edition of Fox News' "Live Desk"
* On the May 12 edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe"
That's 12 appearances, in nine and a half days, spanning four networks. (On today's "Morning Joe," Liz Cheney was on for an entire hour -- effectively becoming a co-host of the program.) And this is just television, and doesn't include Liz Cheney's interviews on radio or with print media.
There's no modern precedent for such a ridiculous arrangement. Dick Cheney launches a crusade against the White House, and major outlets look for analysis from Cheney's daughter? Who everyone already realizes agrees with everything he says about torture?
This is just crazy.
Sargent: New GOP Ad Compares Threat Of Closing Guantanamo To Nuclear War
The Republican National Committee has a new Web ad that appears to suggest that the stakes of the Guantanamo issue are as high as those of the Cold War nuke standoff:
The ad references the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad that Lyndon Johnson ran against challenger Barry Goldwater, which featured a little girl plucking daisy petals while a voiceover counted down to a nuclear detonation. The Johnson ad suggested that Goldwater’s reckless temperament could lead us into nuclear war.
The new RNC ad shows Obama saying that it will be “easy” to close down Guantanamo, then airs the “Daisy” voiceover saying: “These are the stakes.” The suggestion appears to be that closing down Guantanamo potentially poses as big a threat as did the possibility of war with a nuclear-armed superpower — and that Obama’s move to close Guantanamo is as reckless and dangerous as Goldwater’s comments about possibly using nukes in Vietnam.
The ad, which also quotes Congressional Dems defecting from Obama on the issue, shows how neatly those Dems have fallen into the GOP’s trap by letting them drive the Gitmo debate. It has now enabled the Republicans to use the issue as a wedge and to use the words of Democrats to try to cast doubts on Obama’s ability to keep us safe.
If nothing else, the comparison of the stakes of Guantanamo to those of the Cold War signals how enormous the GOP’s ambitions are for the Guantanamo issue.
Benen: EVERY DAY IS GINGRICH DAY...
Chris Hayes had a tweet on Wednesday morning that really resonated with me: "Every morning I wake up, anxious to see what Newt Gingrich has to say about the issues of the day."Chris was, of course, being sarcastic. The problem, though, is that major news outlets seem to genuinely believe Americans really do wake up, anxious to see what the disgraced former House Speaker has to say about current events.
This morning, for example, the Washington Post offers readers an 800-word op-ed from Gingrich about public attitudes on the size of government, Wouldn't you know it, Gingrich thinks there's a mass movement of people out there who think exactly the same way he does.
In the great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites, there will soon be a party of people rooting out the party of government. This party may be Republican; it may be Democratic; in some states it may be a third party. The politicians have been warned.
Anxious to hear more? You're in luck -- Newt Gingrich will be the featured guest on "Meet the Press" this weekend.
He was lying on Fox News yesterday. He was lying on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday. More of the same on "The Daily Show" on Tuesday. Looking over CNN's political blog, which tends to keep up pretty well with the big political stories of a given day, Gingrich's various attacks have generated "news" every other day for a week.
As Atrios asked the other day: "[Y]ou know, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has precisely zero power but his every pronouncement is treated as Incredibly Important News. Any journalists want to explain why?"
I try to pay at least some attention to what Gingrich is popping off on, in part because many GOP leaders are inclined to follow his lead, no matter how little sense he makes.
But the constant media coverage has been embarrassing for a while, and it seems to be getting worse.
Eric Boehlert's take the other day -- before the WaPo op-ed and "Meet the Press" announcement -- was spot-on: ["A]s often happens when I read breaking, this-is-what-Newt-said dispatches, I couldn't help thinking, 'Who cares what Newt Gingrich thinks?' And I don't mean that in the partisan sense. I mean it in the journalistic sense: How do Gingrich's daily pronouncements about the fundamental dishonesty of Democrats (Newt's favorite phrase) translate into news? Why does the press, 10 years after Gingrich was forced out of office, still treat his every partisan utterance as a newsworthy occurrence? In other words, why does the press still treat him like he's speaker of the House? It's unprecedented."
I'm still waiting to see the media frenzy surrounding the latest pronouncements from Jim Wright and Tom Foley. I have a hunch I'm going to be waiting for a long time.
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