"It's time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information." (Rachel Maddow, 2/6/2009)
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This is a better blog clipping service.
Have environmentalists who focus on climate change really "undermined the cause with claims bordering on the outlandish," as the Washington Post's Dana Milbank said a couple of days ago? Apparently not. The Wonk Room took a look at those claims and found that (a) they were true, (b) many of them didn't have anything to do with global warming, and (c) they weren't made by environmentalists anyway.
This is what happens when you take stenography from the Heritage Foundation. Any reporter past his senior year in high school ought to know better.
It no longer matters whether or not a politician’s performance (I think that’s the right word here) has any connection with any kind of discernible reality. Movie-goers are pickier about the believability of movies than pundits are about the believability of politicians’ claims. You’re more likely to hear a movie-goer complain “there’s no way a school teacher could afford that penthouse” than to hear David Broder complain “there’s no way `we win, you lose’ can be a serious foreign policy”.
I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but it's true. And it isn't just Broder. The entire Gasbag mafia spends all their time determining how "believable" politicians appear rather than whether one should believe them.
As if to prove the above point, here's a headline from the Times
With the spin war over the Recovery Act in full swing today, a Democrat points out that Karl Rove seemed to debut a new talking point today: Yes, the economy is recovering, but this is in spite of the Recovery Act, not because of it.
Rove’s assertion is interesting, because it may foreshadow an argument we may hear more often from stimulus critics, should more good economic news start rolling in:
“This in many ways is a false debate,” Rove said. “The economy is stabilized compared to where it was a year ago, but is it because the government has spent $200 billion in the stimulus program? I don’t think so.”
“If you take a look worldwide, the Federal Reserve and the central banks have injected $30 trillion into the world economy,” Rove continued, before acknowledging: “Again, the economy is going to recover, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
The Times directly took on the argument — echoed here by Rove — that the economy would have improved without the stiumulus. It concluded that “the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit” for the recovery we’ve seen.
Most polls show Americans are strongly skeptical of the stimulus’ efficacy, and Dems have lots of work to do in changing their minds. But you’d think this task might become marginally easier, should more evidence of recovery start rolling in. Rove has now sounded the counterargument, and it seems likely that this is where the debate is heading next.
The realist in me watches the fervent Tea Partiers, tugging the Republican Party even further to the right, and the Republican congressional leadership, reaping the short-term rewards of obstruction -- and worries.
"What I think Evan has been trying to communicate is that politics cannot be seen as a zero-sum game where one side wipes the floor with the other side," Wyden told me. Until this happens, he said, "I think you're going to see more good and thoughtful people say that they're going to find other things to do."
Unspoken conclusion? This is bad for both parties and each is equally at fault. Bleh. When will the Villagers have the guts to simply say that one party is openly obstructionist and trying to ruin the system as best they can for political gain? I won't hold my breath.
The political retirement of Evan Bayh, at age 54, is being portrayed by various sages as a result of too much partisanship, or the Senate's dysfunction, or even the systemic breakdown of American governance. Most of this is rationalization. The real story, of which Mr. Bayh's frustration is merely the latest sign, is the failure once again of liberal governance.
How would we possibly know, since we don't have liberal governance? We have at most the same centrist governance Bayh represents, and more to the point the fruition of years of conservative ruin.
How glorious is the tea-party movement? Some talk of its purity of heart, its patriotic spontaneity, and its abundance of republican virtue. To hear others tell it, the movement is but a few steps away from sacred.
After attending the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the prominent blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote last week in the Washington Examiner that the movement amounted to "America's Third Great Awakening," a massive popular rising against "politicians and parties" that have "grown corrupt, venal and out-of-touch."
How strange, then, that this flowering of populist integrity should have been tended and pruned and succored by a group of Beltway operators known primarily for their venality and insider power.
Barnum was right. There's a sucker born every minute.
Plouffe Feels the Need to Tell Obama Supporters What the Stimulus Has Done
This evening former Obama for America campaign manager David Plouffe sent an email to supporters of what's now called Organizing for America, asking them if they're "wondering what ...President Obama's stimulus bill -- has accomplished?"
If so, he tells them to look at this chart showing how job losses have steadily become less and less horrible.
That Plouffe feels the need to tell Obama supporters what the stimulus bill has accomplished speaks volumes about how successful the Obama administration's selling job has been (to say nothing of how Democrats feel the media has reported the stimulus bill's impact.)
As Tapper seems to suggest, perhaps if reporters spent more time covering the actual impact of policy rather than divining the political significance of fairly straightforward e-mails, political strategists like Plouffe wouldn't "feel the need" to moonlight as journalists.
For Tapper, the attempt to sell the stimulus bill-by, say, telling people why the stimulus bill has worked--is proof that the attempt to sell the stimulus bill has failed. Apparently, the Obama administration was supposed to sell the stimulus without, say, attempting to sell the stimulus. It is unclear how that would work. Perhaps it is kind of like being cool, which requires not actually stating you are cool. Other people simply have to realize you are cool.
First Hiatt fired the only opinion writer who really held Cheney to account for war crimes, Dan Froomkin. Then he hires a mediocre writer, and proud Catholic-for-torture, and Cheney's former speech-writer, Marc Thiessen, for a weekly column. So it's perhaps no surprise that Bart Gellman, the best journalist on Cheney in the country, whose series of pieces which became The Angler is the definitive expose of the paranoid incompetent who was veep under Bush ... has now moved after twenty years to Time magazine.
Watching this paper die a sad and sordid death as it gathers a gaggle of neocon sycophants and has-beens around a proud war criminal like Cheney is truly depressing.
An uneasy truce may have been reached between the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party after Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele spent nearly four hours Tuesday trying to calm the fears of Tea Party leaders who worry that the GOP is out to co-opt their grassroots energy ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.
Steele met with about 50 Tea Party leaders from grassroots organizations around the country in a lengthy bull session at the Capitol Hill Club, a cushy Republican meeting-spot located next to RNC headquarters.
It is going to be funny watching them pretend to retain their “independence” while magically discovering that they share all the Republican goals.
Tomorrow, conservatives from around the country will converge at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which serves as a “showcase of the heart and soul of American conservatism.” The Washington Scene reports that this year’s CPAC will prominently feature a Nancy Pelosi piñata and a Harry Reid punching bag for guests to take turns beating:
Attendees at a conservative conference in town this week will have the opportunity to whack a pinata of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Conservative Political Action Conference “CPAC” begins Thursday here in D.C. and will feature a party Friday evening where guests will have the opportunity to whack a Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pinata.
Keri Ann Meslar, director of development for the Greater Washington Sports Alliance and Katherine Kennedy of The Blonde Charity Mafia will be two of three famous D.C. residents taking a turn at the pinata during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which starts on Thursday. Meslar will be the guest “whacker” at a CPAC-sponsored party in Georgetown.
Mary Christopher, outreach coordinator for CivicForumPAC, said the Pelosi piñata will be filled with favorite Pelosi sayings, bills and candy. The party hopes to invite two other well-known D.C. residents to smash the piñata first, before others in attendance will be invited to try to take the Speaker down. “We’re hoping to have the females whack the piñata and males try their hand at a Harry Reid punching bag,” Christopher said.
CPAC will kick off tomorrow with a keynote speech by Florida GOP primary gubernatorial candidate Marco Rubio.
Wow. By all accounts, he would have easily won re-election. How rare and refreshing when a politician voluntarily steps down. How even more rare and refreshing for him to acknowledge that he can contribute more in the private sector.
The truth is, he certainly can. If Bayh succeeds at business, he will enhance more lives and create more jobs than all of Congress ever does.
The popularity of this sort of rhetoric among small-government types mostly illustrates how small-brained they are. It should be both obvious and uncontroversial to observe that the policy environment shaped by congress has an impact on the welfare of the American people that far exceeds that of most businesses. This is equally true whether or not you’re skeptical of the value of activist government. If you think that taxes are economically ruinous, then politicians who stand against tax increases are doing great things for the economy. And if taxes aren’t economically ruinous, then politicians who advocate for higher taxes and more social services are doing great things for human welfare.
Obviously a small number of businessmen and innovators come up with world-changing ideas. But the majority of people who succeed in business, like the majority of people who succeed at anything, do so in a rather modest way. Senators are very successful politicians who have a major opportunity to shape the country for good or for ill.
With the first anniversary of the stimulus package coming today, there's going to be a fair amount of analysis on the merits of the economic recovery initiative. A good place to start would be this piece from the NYT's David Leonhardt.
Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.
Let's say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let's also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs -- employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.
If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?
Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren't hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.
Among people who know what they're talking about, the fact that the stimulus has been successful isn't even controversial anymore. The leading economic research firms -- IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody's Economy.com -- estimate that the effort has already created as many as 1.8 million jobs, and will create about 2.5 million jobs when all is said and done. As far as the independent Congressional Budget Office is concerned, those are conservative estimates -- the CBO believes the stimulus is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs.
Leonhardt describes the skeptics as "misguided," adding that one can "pick just about any area of the economy" and find evidence of success.
To be sure, the recovery effort should have been bigger and more ambitious. And it would have been, had Senate Republican "moderates" not demanded that the bill be scaled back, offering less assistance to states and local governments -- one of the most effective areas of the legislation. As has become apparent, changing bills to generate "bipartisan" support invariably means making the bills worse, and the stimulus, alas, fits this model.
But the Recovery Act was nevertheless instrumental is rescuing the economy from the abyss.
One year ago, we had three choices: approve the Democratic stimulus plan, approve the Republican spending-freeze plan, or do nothing. We can all be deeply thankful President Obama and a Democratic congressional majority were in office at the time, because two of those three options would likely have been cataclysmic for the global economy.
That Republicans still claim any credibility on this issue is literally laughable. Every time they claim the stimulus didn't work -- an argument we'll no doubt be hearing quite a bit today -- the GOP, which was responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place, looks a little more ridiculous.
* But: Jake Tapper rightly notes that the need for such an aggressive sales pitch a full year later “speaks volumes about how successful the Obama administration’s selling job has been.”
* And: The GOP response, from Eric Cantor: “1 Year, $862 Billion, 4 Million Jobs Lost.” Cantor’s full statement here.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether to expand nuclear power in the United States. The Monthly has been more than a little skeptical about the idea, but support for and opposition to the idea do not necessarily fall along clear ideological or partisan lines.
President Obama, for example, has long expressed a willingness to consider domestic nuclear expansion, and yesterday took a big step in that direction.
President Obama seized a key Republican energy initiative as his own Tuesday, promising $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees for a pair of Georgia reactors that he said would give new life to the U.S. nuclear power industry and create a surge of high-skill jobs.
By helping to finance the construction of the reactors -- the first new U.S. nuclear power units in more than 30 years -- Obama is hoping to jump-start his efforts to pass comprehensive climate-change legislation, which has stalled in Congress in the face of GOP opposition.
I'm happy to let energy policy experts weigh the merits of the loan guarantees. What I found interesting, though, was the reaction from Georgia's right-wing Republican senators, who are thrilled to see their state benefit -- the Obama administration's proposal is likely help create thousands of jobs in Georgia -- but can't quite bring themselves to even use the president's name.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman noted yesterday, for example, that Sens. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) issued a seven-paragraph, 392-word joint statement, lauding the new nuclear initiative. Number of times Isakson and Chambliss used the words "president," "Obama," and/or "White House"? Zero. Even though the senators were delighted to hear the president's announcement, as Bookman concluded, the two "just couldn't bring themselves" to agree with Obama by name.
The president suggested yesterday that an initiative like this one could help bolster bipartisanship, with a Democratic administration finding common ground with GOP policymakers. But the fact that Republican senators don't even want to mention the president, even when they're thrilled with one of his decisions, only reinforces the fact that Republicans just aren't interested.
from the comments:
I've only had one cup of coffee, but please tell me that this post was penned with not a little irony. You are rubbing their nose in something of which Chambliss and Isaacson are very proud. They will never mention that "boy" in the White House.
Posted by: scott F. on February 17, 2010 at 8:41 AM
Filibuster falls from favor Feb. 16: New York Times columnist Gail Collins talks with Rachel Maddow about rising tide of animosity toward the Senate filibuster.
Vice President Joe Biden doesn't seem to miss his days as a senator.
In an interview with CBS "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith, Biden was blunt about the nation's political system. "Washington, right now, is broken."
Having served in the Senate for more than 30 years, Biden has seen a fair share of gridlock in Congress, but the current version is the worst ever, he said.
"I don't ever recall a time in my career where to get anything done, you needed a supermajority, 60 out of 100 senators.... I've never seen it this dysfunctional," he said.
Right. The system in Washington is "broken." Every effort does require an inexplicable "supermajority." The entire policymaking process is "dysfunctional."
But what officials need to understand is the importance of taking the next step -- explaining why this is and who is responsible.
As much as I'm sympathetic to the vice president's entirely accurate concerns, his omissions make all the difference. For viewers who don't know what filibusters or cloture votes are, they're thinking, "There's a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. If the system is broken and dysfunctional, maybe it's Democrats' fault."
Except, for anyone interested in reality, that assumption couldn't be more wrong. If legislation received up-or-down votes in both chambers -- the way Congress operated for the better part of two centuries -- the system would work quite well and the dysfunction that drives everyone crazy would largely disappear.
Biden, in other words, needs to name names -- Republicans broke the American legislative process. They did so deliberately, during a time of crises, because they're desperate to undercut the Democratic majority, regardless of the consequences. The GOP's tactics have no precedent in American history, and violate every democratic norm that keeps our system moving.
It's not enough to share Americans' disgust; Dems need to help the public understand this mess. They can do so by avoiding jargon and legislative terminology, and calling Republicans' obstructionist tactics what they are: a dangerous political scandal.
Don't talk about "filibusters" or "supermajorities"; talk about the Republican "scandal" that has brought the system to a halt. Talk about Republicans "shutting down" the American policymaking process, and ignoring the will of the voters.
Howard Fineman delivers some real talk on Mitch McConnell:
The blizzard had paralyzed Washington. So it was an apt day for a chat (by phone) with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is working successfully—yet with surprisingly little personal notoriety—to bury the Barack Obama presidency in an unplowed cul-de-sac called the U.S. Senate. As the GOP leader there, McConnell strands Democrats in snowdrifts of parliamentary procedure and nasty talking points. "We are not just reflexively looking for areas where there will be no progress," he assured me. Having spent many years listening to McConnell, I can translate: he is reflexively looking for areas where there will be no progress.
But, to be fair, that's sort of what the minority leader should be doing: Trying to get himself and his allies back into the majority. It's not even a dirty, partisan thing, If you're a Republican, and you believe Republican ideas improve the nation, then you want to be back in power so you can get to work improving the nation. It's a clean, partisan thing.
The problem comes when you take that perfectly sensible position and pair it with a set of parliamentary powers that allow the minority to get back into power by obstructing any efforts the majority makes at governance. The problem, in other words, isn't Mitch McConnell. It's the unplowed cul-de-sac.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) told Morning Joe today that he's opposed to changing the Senate's filibuster rules. He also spoke to the virtues of partisanship.
Dodd, who recently announced he will retire from the Senate this year, said he thinks it would be "foolish" to change filibuster rules.
"I'm totally opposed to the idea of changing the filibuster rules. I think that's foolish, in my view," he said.
The problem, he said, was a lack of civility in the Senate, stemming from a lack of "chemistry" among senators.
"You can write all the rules you want, but at the end of the day, if the chemistry isn't there" you don't have a functioning Senate, he said.
There's a movement to change the filibuster rules, lead by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has dismissed the idea.
Dodd was asked about Sen. Evan Bayh's (D-IN) retirement announcement yesterday, in which he said that the Senate is "dysfunctional" with "brain-dead partisanship." Dodd disagreed.
"There's nothing wrong with partisanship. I think we've got to get over this notion that there's something inherently evil about partisanship. This country was founded in partisanship," he said. The problem, he said, is "the lack of civility. It's the inability to compromise."
In response to the observation that egregious, hypocritical behavior doesn't embarrass republicans, Kaylyn said:
Its obvious why they are not embarrassed. This is their carefully coordinated and controlled plan. Remember the pizza parlour party back in February 09? Someone was probably jacking with the poor waitress and somebody else saw it as a model for their strategy. "Hey hon, can you get me a Coke?" Drinks half the Coke. "Oh, miss? I don't want a Coke, bring me a DP" Orders a deluxe pizza with extra cheese. Eats half of it. "Hey, this pizza has to much cheese. And I don't like all this other crap on it. I'm not paying for this. Bring me a Pepperoni pizza with black olives?" Eats half...and well you know he hates black olives. And DP. Won't pay for it. Asks for a coke and a salad. Leaves before it arrives. No tip. Kept the waitress and the Kitchen busy for an hour or more, gets to eat two half pizzas, and doesn't pay for any of it cuz the food was lousy and not what he wanted. Comes back for lunch the next day.
They're Getting Embarrassed! DNC chair Tim Kaine on 2010 Feb. 16: Democratic Party chairman Tim Kaine talks with Rachel Maddow about the lessons learned from the Massachusetts Senate election and how he plans to direct the Democrats through the 2010 campaign season.
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
Not, of course, that this lesson has been heeded lately by an entire swath of legislators who put the bipartisanship fetish on a pedestal higher than the combined interests of a) getting good legislation passed, and b) their own electoral chances.
But hey, at least we have Rachel Maddow calling them out for taking credit for recommending the pasta. Aren't we all just dying to find out where we'll be a year from now?
Today, the Wall Street Journal reported on more than a dozen Republican lawmakers who voted against the stimulus last year but subsequently “supported stimulus-funding requests” submitted by their constituents to federal agencies. One such lawmaker was Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), who said she didn’t believe “that it would create the jobs that were promised.” In November, she even issued a call to “recall the stimulus funds that have not been spent.” Of course, Schmidt wasn’t so concerned about the federal deficit to turn down supporting “funding requests from local organizations training workers for energy-efficiency projects.”
Today, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto pushed her on her hypocrisy. Schmidt spun all sorts of circles trying to justify her move, saying that she would still “return that money to the Treasury” if she could, but the “genie is out of the bottle.” Cavuto repeatedly asked her how Republicans were any different from Democrats, pointed out how what they were doing was “offensive” to some folks, and hit her for sending a “mixed message.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) went on next and defended Schmidt: “She’s being very genuine in saying, ‘Look, I wouldn’t have voted for the stimulus.’ … But if she’s going to be held accountable, and the people in her district and the people in the entire country are going to have to pay for it, well then yes, certainly the Democrats aren’t suggesting that the stimulus dollars go to just the Democratic counties.” “You’re being very selective in your rage here,” concluded Cavuto. Watch it:
Democrats were never saying that all the money should go to Democratic districts; they were saying that Republicans should have been helping to bring money to all districts without simultaneously spouting political attacks claiming that the stimulus wasn’t going to “create any jobs.”
Also in the interview, Chaffetz claimed he wasn’t one of the lawmakers begging for stimulus handouts:
CAVUTO: Did constituents seek you out and say, “Could you get funding for me for this,” and did you turn them down? Yes or no.
CHAFFETZ: Well, in general, yes, I did turn them down.
Chaffetz must have forgotten about the letter he and other Utah lawmakers sent the Interior Department “on behalf of the Provo River Water Users Association seeking $95 million in [stimulus] funds.”
It's often called the "cash-and-trash" strategy -- Republicans hate the stimulus package and "trash" it at every available opportunity, but love the stimulus package and grab the "cash" when it comes to creating jobs in their own states/districts. It's been going on for a year, but the phenomenon keeps spreading.
Last week, the Washington Times found that "more than a dozen Republican lawmakers," all of whom insisted that the stimulus package was an awful idea that couldn't possibly help the economy, privately urged the Department of Agriculture to send stimulus money to their states and districts, touting the investments' economic benefits.
Today, the Wall Street Journalmoves the ball forward with still more GOP lawmakers who say they oppose the very idea of the stimulus package, but who nevertheless believe the stimulus will help improve the economy in their areas.
More than a dozen Republican lawmakers supported stimulus-funding requests submitted to the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Forest Service, in letters obtained by The Wall Street Journal through the Freedom of Information Act.
It's quite a motley crew. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the stimulus "misses the mark on all counts," but encouraged the Labor Department to invest stimulus money in his district, highlighting a project he said would create 1,000 jobs. Reps. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) and Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), both right-wing opponents of the recovery efforts, did the same thing.
It's not just House Republicans, either. Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Bob Bennett (R-Utah), and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) all told the Obama administration that the stimulus would improve the economy in their states by directing funds in their direction.
The takeaway here should be pretty obvious, and it goes beyond just the impressive levels of hypocrisy. When push comes to shove, and it's their constituents on the line, Republicans know that the stimulus works. For all their palaver about how government spending is simply incapable of creating jobs and generating economic growth, we know they don't mean it -- we have the written requests for stimulus funds to prove it.
Also note, the WSJ report only covers Labor, EPA, and Forest Service. It's very likely that many more Republican lawmakers who opposed the stimulus also reached out to other agencies, convinced that the money would do wonders in their state/district.
Expect the Democratic campaign committees to emphasize this heavily as the election season nears.
Congressional Republicans' cash-and-trash strategy -- trashing the economic stimulus, while embracing stimulus cash at the same time -- has become an interesting spectacle. But as Christina Bellantoni reminds us, the GOP's hypocrisy extends to governors, too.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell offered effusive praise for $24 million in federal funds that allowed him to establish an office of Health Information Technology and to fund a program helping Virginia doctors transition to electronic medical records.
Just one problem -- he thinks the government shouldn't have spent that money to begin with.
Yes, the new Virginia governor spent much of 2009 insisting that the stimulus investments were a wasteful idea, which wouldn't help the economy. As of yesterday, McDonnell thinks at least $24 million of those investments are a great idea that will help the economy.
Of course, McDonnell isn't alone. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), who's relentlessly attacked the stimulus as part of his presidential campaign, has described recovery efforts as "wasted" and "misdirected." As of this week, however, the governor released his plan to fill the shortfall in his state budget, and wouldn't you know it, "nearly one-third of the governor's budget fix would rely on $387 million in federal stimulus money."
Neither is quite as shameless as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) -- who's a Hypocrisy Hall of Famer -- but the list of Republican governors who love and hate the stimulus at the same time is certainly getting longer.
At face value, the Republican response may seem reasonable enough. The money has already been allocated, and is going to be spent, they say. It only makes sense, then, to help their constituents as much as possible.
But this misses the point. To hear GOP officials tell it, government spending isn't just inherently wrong, it's inherently useless. Investing tax dollars can't create jobs, can't generate growth, and can't be relied on to improve economic conditions. By asking for stimulus money, accepting stimulus money, and occasionally even handing out stimulus money, these same GOP officials are conceding that their argument is wrong.
And frankly, we knew they were wrong anyway. The recovery effort created jobs, generated growth, and rescued the economy from a depression. Seeing Republicans scramble to secure funds for their states and districts only makes clearer what's been obvious to economists for months.
The decent thing to do would be for Republicans to simply apologize for getting us into this mess, acknowledge how wrong they were to oppose President Obama's effective solution, and then thank Democrats for rescuing the economy.
I'm sure the White House would be gracious in response.
GOP hypocritical about stimulus Feb. 16: The Wall Street Journal has obtained letters from Republican lawmakers privately asking for stimulus funds they were publically railing against. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson discusses.
At this point the odds are that in response to the most devastating financial crisis since the Great Depression, we will do … nothing.
And while there is plenty of blame to spread around, it’s important not to be too even-handed. The fact is that the Democrat-controlled House has already passed a pretty good reform bill. But in the Senate, well, here’s what the FT reports:
Senate Republicans are resisting a fundamental tenet of the Obama administration’s financial regulatory reforms in another obstacle for the stalled legislative process.
Several aides from both parties involved in reform negotiations told the Financial Times that Republicans had opposed in private a plan to impose tougher capital and liquidity requirements on companies that posed a risk to the financial system.
That’s tantamount to opposing any real reform.
You might think that the GOP would pay a political price for this. But it already has its strategy: insist that black is white.
The right-wing group “Committee for Truth In Politics” seems to have taken the advice of the postmodernist Frank Luntz, and cast new regulations on Wall Street, which Wall Street is furiously attempting to kill, as a giant favor to Wall Street.
One annoying recurring feature of talk about the present political situation is the presumption on the part of the centrist members of congress who’ve been driving the legislative agenda that the left has, in fact, been driving the legislative agenda. It’s worth reviewing the mainstream liberal policy agenda for the 111th Senate:
— A $1.2 trillion stimulus. — The forcible breakup of large banks. — Universal health care with a public option linked to Medicare rates. — An economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, with the permits auctioned. — Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. — A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. — An exit strategy from Afghanistan. — An end to special exemption of military spending from fiscal discipline. — An independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency. — The Employee Free Choice Act.
None of these things have happened. And it’s worth emphasizing that the White House hasn’t even seriously attempted to do the vast majority of these things. I, personally, am a Great Big Sellout and think that it’s generally made sense for the White House not to expend much time or energy on futile fights. But the fact is that the fights could have been picked, and weren’t. Had the fights been picked, you could reasonably blame “the base” for whatever problems ensued. Had the agenda been enacted, you could reasonably blame “the base” for whatever backlash ensued. But the White House hasn’t been doing this. Instead, with the exception of the CFPA and not much else, they’ve been fighting for what they regard as a more feasible agenda that comes pre-trimmed to suit the demands of centrist legislators.
Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd in another one of their false equivalency arguments throw Grover Norquist, unions and the netroots into the same batch and claim they control the Congress. And Chuck Todd interprets Evan Bayh's speech today on why he's not running for office again to say he was saying there's no room in the Senate for "centrists". "Centrist" is nothing but code for another corporate controlled politician. Since Senate millionaires club is made up of little else but, I don't know what the hell he's talking about here. It makes absolutely no sense.
The activists might get a response from these politicians when it comes to their campaign rhetoric, but at the end of the day their donors are who they're answering to when they govern and Matthews and Todd know it. Matthews of course will never let that stop him from getting his shots in on the netroots though. Todd also seems to be giving Norquist a lot more credit for his shift to the right than he deserves since Norquist has been around for ages pushing Republicans on these tax purity tests, even though he acknowledges the shift has come with a primary challenge from the right winger Hayworth.
MATTHEWS: OK, let’s talk turkey here.
CILLIZZA: ... ran for president...
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to Chuck Todd on the big picture here. Just a year or so ago, Arlen Specter of my state quit the Republican Party, saying there’s no room in it for centrist politicians like himself.
CHUCK TODD: Right.
MATTHEWS: Is this a sign that there’s no room in the Democratic Party for centrist politicians like Evan Bayh? He seemed to be saying that today.
TODD: No, I think what Evan Bayh is saying is there’s no room in the Senate for centrist politicians, period. You know, the fact is he said he doesn’t love Congress. It was an amazing, blunt attack on Congress. You know, frankly, there’s 70 percent of Americans agree with him on that statement. Nobody loves Congress right now. Very few seem to like what’s going on there.
And he -- to put it that way tells you that -- look, he had never really had to work hard before for an election. He was going to have to work a little bit harder, travel the state. And guess what? If he didn’t want to be here another six years, this was his last chance to quit because the filing deadline is literally hours and days away.
MATTHEWS: Well, it’s so smart. I’ve never heard anybody before say - - not that I don’t like the Congress, a lot of people say that -- I don’t like being in the Congress.
[…]
MATTHEWS: Chuck, I hear from a source out there, a friend of mine who told me what he could about the -- off the record with the guy -- not off the record, on background -- he thought the one final straw was the failure of this deficit commission to get accepted by the Congress...
TODD: Yes.
MATTHEWS: ... that he -- being from Indiana, and I know from years of working on the Hill, the Indiana -- the Hoosier delegation has always been absolutely all the way connected to the idea of deficit reduction, balanced budget amendments. Even the Democrats for years out there, people like Lee Hamilton, a much respected member, would always vote for the balanced budget amendment, even though the liberals didn’t like it. He felt, I guess, that the failure of that commission to get enacted was a real killer for him.
TODD: Well, it was. You know, it was interesting today, we had -- to sort of to connect everything to three degrees separation here, John McCain right now just started on a campaign tour of Arizona, J.D. Hayworth, former Republican congressman, challenging him from the right. Earlier today, I interviewed Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and he said had John McCain supported that bipartisan commission, he would not have gotten the support of Grover Norquist and the tax-cutting crowd.
Well, guess what? McCain voted against it after being a co-sponsor because that was his ticket to political survival, probably, in a Republican primary. He couldn’t afford...
MATTHEWS: OK, explain...
TODD: ... to alienate, so now...
MATTHEWS: Explain to regular people, why wouldn’t a fiscal conservative want to have deficit reduction.
TODD: Because in Grover Norquist's estimation, it means, if you support that commission, you’re supporting a tax hike because, supposedly, both potential tax hikes and spending cuts would be on the table. Now, Norquist argues that every time this -- that both things have been on the table, well, it’s never been spending cuts, it’s always been tax hikes. And therefore, he made it clear to these Republicans that were thinking about supporting this, if you support it, you’re supporting a tax hike. And seven of them flipped. And that is what seemed to put not just Bayh over the edge...
MATTHEWS: Boy, that’s...
TODD: ... George Voinovich...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: We elect the senators, but people like Grover Norquist and unions and the netroots people have more clout across -- that is a great demonstration -- than any Senate -- in other words, senators are not leaders. They’re not Edmund Burkes. They don’t vote their conscience. They in many ways are forced to vote because of the activists on the left and right.
CILLIZZA: Well, Chris, look at health care. I mean, I think health care is a perfect example. This is something that looked like it could go. All of a sudden, we’re now at an absolute deadlock. And we’re at a deadlock in many ways not simply because Republicans want to, but people like Blanche Lincoln, Michael Bennet are nervous.
MATTHEWS: OK. So in other words, people in college that couldn’t get elected corridor representative are now telling senators how to vote. And I’m serious about this. Grover Norquist has more power -- it’s scary to hear that he can tell McCain, a war hero, what to do.
When it became clear to Bayh that the White House wasn’t going to play his game—wasn’t going to sell out liberals at every turn—Bayh decided he had had enough.
You also get the sense that, as is usually the case, there isn’t really much policy substance here, it’s all about the joys of hippie punching.
It is certainly my impression that there lots of wise, principled centrists encouraging the Obama administration to punch hippies harder. The real problem with punching hippies, of course, is that these days, hippies are generally advocating smart policies (even when I don’t agree with their methods of getting them enacted).
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
....Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.
....The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure.....They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.
That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).
If you think these folks have a serious chance at building a movement, this piece is pretty scary. But if you think they're such obvious cranks that they'll never be able to organize beyond the PTA level, it's actually a bit of a relief. I'm mostly in the latter camp. What's more, if writer David Barstow is right, their energy is largely driven by hard times. Once the recession starts to abate, they're going to lose a lot of steam.
But whether or not you agree, the whole piece is worth reading.
Olbermann: Beware fear's racist temptation Feb. 15: In a Special Comment, Keith Olbermann explores the relationship between fear and racism and encourages Americans who are distressed about the nation's future to avoid political groups that appeal to their less noble inclinations.
Sun columnist Jon Ralston is reporting that the Tea Party has qualified as a third party in Nevada and will have a candidate in the Senate race to battle for the seat held by Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The party has filed a Certificate of Existence but needs to get 1 percent of the electorate to vote for its candidate in November to permanently qualify, according to the report.
Ralston reported that Jon Ashjian will be the Tea Party's U.S. Senate candidate on the November ballot. Ashjian still must declare his candidacy.
The natural question to ask is, are we supposed to call it the Tea Party party, or just the Tea party?
It remains to be seen how much of a difference this will make. But given Reid's deservedly lousy polling, he needs all the good news he can get. He got one piece late last week in the news that Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki won't run, and anything that can drive a wedge on the right and siphon off a few votes that might otherwise go Republican counts in the good news category.
For all the baseless whining about how the Obama administration handled the Abdulmutallab case, it appears increasingly obvious that the White House's approach was not only correct, but is paying dividends that benefit all of us. Eli Lake has this important report.
U.S. and allied counterterrorism authorities have launched a global manhunt for English-speaking terrorists trained in Yemen who are planning attacks on the United States, based on intelligence provided by the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day bombing after he began cooperating.
U.S. officials told The Washington Times that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, facing charges as a would-be suicide bomber, revealed during recent cooperation with the FBI that he met with other English speakers at a terrorist training camp in Yemen. Three U.S. intelligence officials, including one senior official, disclosed on the condition of anonymity some details of the additional bomb plots. [...]
Information about the bomb plots was shared with the FBI after Mr. Abdulmutallab's family traveled from Nigeria to help coax the former student into cooperating, after a period of about five weeks when he refused to help authorities.
Let's be really clear about this. Republican criticism hasn't just strayed badly from reality in the Abdulmutallab case; the more important takeaway is that if U.S. policy followed Republican talking points, we'd be less safe as a nation right now.
On the surface, one of the key GOP attacks is the notion that making Abdulmutallab aware of his rights meant that we were denied important intelligence about possible terrorist threats. It should be painfully obvious that Republicans have no idea what they're talking about -- Abdulmutallab has provided critically important information since getting a lawyer and being Mirandized.
But we can also go one step further and realize the depths of Republicans' misguided ideas here. If, for example, we'd locked up Abdulmutallab in a military prison and/or denied him Miranda rights, he wouldn't be cooperating right now.
The White House has defended the decision to treat Mr. Abdulmutallab as a criminal on the grounds that the suspect's family has coaxed him into cooperating, something that likely would not have occurred had he not been afforded access to counsel.
There's a "global manhunt" underway to prevent potentially deadly terrorist attacks precisely because the U.S. is operating under Obama's approach, and not Cheney's.
For anyone who takes American security seriously, this policy debate is over. The discredited right looks increasingly ridiculous with each passing day.
If only we’d tortured that pants bomber guy we wouldn’t be facing these kind of massive military setbacks:
The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.
The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder, and was a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Spencer Ackerman offers the pragmatic case against torturing Baradar—the goal of our anti-Taliban military operations is to bring some substantial bloc of Taliban types to the table in a bargain, but nobody’s going to give up if they think that means being subject to brutal treatment.
Dick Cheney would only celebrate this victory if Baradar were being tortured, I suspect. And on that note, Ackerman has an important post:
Apparently Baradar has been in custody since last week and is being interrogated by both the Paks and us. (This is why the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group exists.) The ultimate point of fighting the Taliban is to compel them to give up fighting and accept some version of a post-Taliban order in Afghanistan. Torturing Baradar — which the Pakistanis have been known to do — is counterproductive to that effort. If we treat the guy respectfully, in a demonstrated way, it might spur a reconsideration of Taliban goals. I am not counting any chickens, but any hope of a game-changing possibility will be foreclosed upon if we or our allies torture Baradar. Let’s be smart — and true to Obama’s stated principles/executive order. If there was any doubt whatsoever, the Abdulmutallab case proved we don’t need to torture to get good intelligence.
This really could be a major turning point--having as important a prisoner as Baradar in custody and treating him according to the Geneva Conventions is critical to this administration showing the world that it has broken from the lawless Bush administration's past. The success of capturing the most powerful Taliban leader ever caught in this war already sets this administration apart. Let his treatment at our and the Pakistanis' hand do the same.
Republicans really want to force John Brennan, President Obama's senior counterterrorism adviser, to resign. They just haven't been able to find a reason yet.
In the latest dust-up, Brennan compared detainee recidivism to the American penal system, and concluded that "one out of five detainees" released from U.S. custody "returned to some type of extremist activity," which "isn't that bad."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used the comments to call for Brennan's ouster, telling Fox News this morning that any official who compares the two recidivism rates has necessarily "lost touch with reality." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) have also seized on Brennan's comparison as evidence that the senior counterterrorism adviser needs to go.
[A]las, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a very similar argument during an AP interview in 2005. And she, like, Brennan likened the rates of recidivism among enemy combatants to that of American criminals.
"[B]y the way, recidivism isn't just a problem at Guantanamo; it is a problem with criminal justice as well," she said.
We checked the clips: None of the three Brennan critics so much as peeped when Rice made her comments.
Imagine that.
Keep trying, Republicans. I'm sure you're bound to think of something credible eventually.
And while the complaining at the kids' table keeps getting louder, grown-ups like Brennan can keep working on national security issues. By all appearances, the White House couldn't care less about the GOP campaign against Brennan, which is as it should be.
Cheney, devoid of credibility, makes mockery of security Feb. 15: Rachel Maddow condemns Dick Cheney and the cadre of echoing partisans who dishonestly attack the Obama administration for treating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a civilian criminal when every single person who was arrested on a terrorism charge during the Bush administration was handled the same way, including being Mirandized.
Olbermann says a source in the Bayh camp cited “left bloggers” as a reason for his leaving. “People said mean things to me!” What a fucking loser.
In addition to patchouli, it appears the DFH has another weapon in his arsenal to defeat centrists- the sternly worded blog post. I think every centrist, right now, should be required to answer whether they could ever be driven from a race by “left bloggers.” Because if they can, then I think these Senators should, at the very least, be forbidden from voting on matters of war and national security.
And could someone deploy the Mother of All Blog Posts against Ben Nelson?
Here is one from the "negotiating in good faith" files.
On February 8th, Republican House leader John Beohner sent a letter to the White House, demanding that the White House post online any health care proposal it wished to discuss at the health care summit:
If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?
So, four days later, the White House accepted this demand, and announced it would post a legislative proposal online more than 72 hours before the summit:
Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package.
So, naturally, the next day, Boehner attacked the White House for giving into his demand:
"A productive bipartisan discussion should begin with a clean sheet of paper," Boehner said in a statement.
Ross Douthat's column on health care reform notes that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree on the policy, but also on the definition of "bipartisanship."
For President Obama, being "bipartisan" means incorporating a few right-of-center proposals into an essentially liberal legislative package. For Republicans, it means doing only those things that legislators of both parties can agree on -- a far more stringent standard, and one that would produce a very different bill.
Hence the frustration on both sides with the way the health care debate has proceeded. To Democrats, the right's complaints about having its ideas ignored are purely cynical. Doesn't the proposed legislation include ideas endorsed by prominent conservative economists? Don't some of its proposals resemble those championed by John McCain? Didn't Democrats eschew a single-payer approach in favor of a reform that retains a role for private insurers?
To conservatives, this misses the point: It isn't the details of the bill that they object to, it's the overall design.
That's at least partially true. Republicans have concluded that the basic framework of the Democratic proposal -- subsidies for the uninsured, consumer protections -- is fundamentally at odds with failed minority party's ideology. (At least, that's what they've concluded now. A few months ago, Republicans agreed -- publicly and repeatedly -- that they found 80 percent of the Democratic plan entirely reasonable.)
With this in mind, when Democrats embrace specific GOP provisions, it doesn't seem to matter, precisely because, as Douthat noted, Republicans reject the premise. It's like Democrats chose to order a pizza for dinner, and invited the GOP to help pick the toppings. But Republicans don't want a pizza for dinner; they want tire rims and anthrax. Choosing toppings is little consolation.
But Douthat's description of the GOP's understanding of bipartisanship is overly broad. For Republican leaders, the idea isn't to stick to "only those things that legislators of both parties can agree on" -- itself a ridiculous notion when the parties differ -- but rather to stick to only those things the GOP can tolerate.
Indeed, just last week, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), among others, said they only health care reform package that can pass is the one created entirely by GOP lawmakers. Democrats may be in the majority, but the minority party believes only their ideas should be allowed to come to the floor for votes. The "only" health care plan Republicans will consider, Cantor said, is the Republican plan.
In this sense, "bipartisanship" is defined as giving Republicans exactly what they want, and nothing else. Period.
And if this were a normal legislative dynamic for the United States, such an argument would be laughed at and dismissed. But because Republicans have decided that the majority is no longer allowed to govern, an up-or-down votes can only occur if the GOP approves of the underlying bill, we're left with this maddening status quo.
The White House created some confusion on Friday when it issued its invitation, particularly with this part:
Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit.
It is the President’s hope that the Republican congressional leadership will also put forward their own comprehensive bill to achieve those goals and make it available online as well.
Did this mean that the White House was going to proposed a watered down plan with just those four elements included? Was it going to be some truncation of the existing legislation? Apparently not, according to what Ezra found out over the weekend.
I spoke to the White House over the weekend and they indicated that the president's package will not be a new White House plan, but a compromise between the House and Senate bills. That is to say, the White House expects that the House and Senate will have a compromise plan by February 25th.
That's not necessarily surprising: The two chambers were pretty close to agreement on a compromise package before Scott Brown's election threw everything into chaos. Presumably, that'll be dusted off for this meeting.
It would seem that the question now that both chambers still have to work out is how much of that compromise could be put into a reconciliation side-car fix. Because, significantly, the package will reflect the compromise which suggests that the White House recognizes that the Senate bill as is won't pass in the House. Whatever the summit is likely to achieve, it isn't going to result in Republicans supporting reform, unless Obama has become a hypnotist.
So, since the existing compromise package is the plan, the big picture hasn't really changed--there has to be a reconciliation fix passed that allows for passage of the Senate bill in the House.
Though they're still not happy about it, Roll Call reports that Republican leaders will participate in the hcr summit [sub req].
Republicans, demanding to have a say in the summit’s format and warning for days they have no interest in attending a "public relations" exercise disguised as a substantive negotiation, say that is exactly what the nationally televised event is setting up to be. But Republican leaders will probably attend anyway – perhaps for their own public relations reasons — though they are already labeling the summit a failure.
"So now the president wants to have a little PR event to try to resell a tremendously unpopular plan to Republicans and the American people. The administration still isn't listening," a House Republican leadership aide said Monday....
In particular, Republicans say Obama’s request that they come to the bipartisan summit armed with their own comprehensive health care reform bill is evidence that the White House is trying to predetermine the event’s outcome for political advantage.
Republicans have declined to produce a massive health care overhaul of their own because they prefer an incremental approach, and insist any negotiation should start from scratch and not be based on the House and Senate health care bills passed late last year. Obama shot down that recommendation during a Feb. 5 news conference, saying he did not want to go through a Congressional committee process that could take another six to eight months.
Boehner, after his demand that the plan be posted online, abruptly changed that demand to starting with "a clean sheet of paper." Senate Republican whip Jon Kyl echoes that, saying the Dems have decided what they want to do anyway, so the only possible way to make this bipartisan is to start entirely from scratch.
While the summit is likely to be mostly PR, the "blank piece of paper" and "starting over from scratch" demands from the Republicans sound more like they just don't want to have to do the work of finally come up with a real plan.
The Anthem Blue Cross saga appears to have a happy ending: After criticism from the administration, the insurer has delayed the planned 40 percent rate hike. That will give the company time to reevaluate whether it's worth the blow-back, and I'd guess there's a good chance it never takes effect at all.
But if this is a good outcome, it's a not a good policy. The insured can't depend on someone in the White House's communications shop noticing when an insurer tries to screw its customers. What we need is an actual policy standing between the insured and the grim incentives of their insurers. That's what health-care reform is meant to be, and the Anthem saga is a good example of how it would work.
The Senate bill contains two separate categories of provisions that would stand between the insured and what Anthem attempted in California. The first are consumer protections that could be invoked if an insurer tried to raise rates precipitously. The second are market reforms that make it less likely for an insurer to try, and less calamitous for individuals if the insurer succeeds.
Let's start with the consumer protections. Under health-care reform, the Anthem plan -- which serves high-risk customers in the individual market -- would be in the exchange. If Anthem attempted to jack rates up by 40 percent, a couple of things would happen.
First, Anthem would have to justify the rate increase to the exchange's administrators and post their justification on their Web site. That's essentially what the Obama administration forced Anthem to do last week, and it was enough to derail the hike. Second, Anthem would run smack into Section 1311 of the bill, which gives regulators the power to control access to the exchanges based on whether the plan "is in the interests of qualified individuals and qualified employers in the State." In fact, the bill specifically states that regulators can take "excessive or unjustified premium increases" into account when deciding whether to certify a health-care plan's continued presence in the exchange.
In other words, Anthem's plan could be kicked out entirely for this rate hike. That would probably have to happen to only one health insurer for the rest to take notice that precipitous and inexplicable rate hikes are no longer going to be part of the business model.
But perhaps the more important part of health-care reform is that it would no longer make sense for Anthem to do this sort of thing. The problem is not that insurers are bad so much as that the market rewards bad behavior with profits. In this case, Anthem has an insurance plan with sicker people that is not proving profitable. They're increasing the costs to either drive those people out or force them to pay a lot more.
Under health-care reform, this wouldn't happen. First, insurers can't discriminate based on preexisting conditions any longer, and their ability to discriminate based on age or other factors is substantially reduced. That means that everyone is functionally in the same big pool.
Second, if one insurer or another does end up with an unusually sick customer base, the next move isn't to jack up rates on them. Instead, Section 1341 of the bill outlines the risk adjustment provisions, which basically means that there's a fund that will pay an insurer more if it ends up with sicker customers. The idea is that insuring people who need health care shouldn't be bad business.
Finally, let's say everything fails and the insurer decides to walk from the exchange. In the current situation, the people on Anthem's plan have nowhere to go. They all have preexisting conditions, which means they either won't be offered insurance or can't afford the rates. Under health-care reform, they can go to any other insurer they please: They can't be discriminated against, and they can't be denied coverage. Losing their current insurance may be disruptive, in the same way that having your local grocery store close might be disruptive. But it will no longer be calamitous, or anything close.
Since Scott Brown's election, the conversation over health-care reform has become very, very political, and quite abstract. But the Anthem decision is a good moment for Democrats to return the conversation to the real problems that the real bill will really solve. If health-care passes, no one need fear what Anthem almost did in California ever again. If it fails, then it will simply continue happening, on and on into the future. That's the choice before Congress right now.
California Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a subsidiary of health insurance giant WellPoint, announced recently that it would be hiking premiums for customers in the individual market by up to 39 percent. The looming hike unleashed a firestorm of criticism, and provoked two Democratic lawmakers to launch congressional probes into the matter. Even a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was compelled to feign concern, telling reporters, “If the argument is that the WellPoint hike means we need reform, well, ‘duh.’”
Earlier today on Fox Business, WellPoint VP Brad Fluegel appeared to discuss the hikes. Fox hosts Charles Payne and and Stu Varney lashed out at WellPoint for increasing rates just when “it was safe to get out of the healthcare debate.” The hosts were uninterested with how the increasing rates would affect customers and struggling families in California. Instead, the pair attacked Fluegel for re-energizing advocates for health reform. Payne groaned, asking Fluegel why he didn’t “take Wall Street’s lead” and “wait for this to blow over and maybe a year from now try to hike rates”:
PAYNE: But Brad this is like Jaws 2, just when you thought it was safe to get out of the healthcare debate, you brought everybody back into it. [...] Didn’t someone though, wasn’t there a committee that said listen, let’s take Wall Street’s lead, do the minimum we can, wait for this to blow over and maybe a year from now try to hike rates?
VARNEY: You handed the politicians red meat at a time when healthcare is being discussed. You gave it to them! [...] You couldn’t see this coming? I mean really, you couldn’t see this coming? [...]
VARNEY: You actually did make a net in that quarter in twleve weeks, you made what, $500 million net profit didn’t you? You tell that to a politician and they’re going to say, ‘you made a half billion dollars in twelve weeks and now you put the price up 25%.’
Watch it:
HCAN has responded to the WellPoint rate hike by releasing a report demonstrating how premium increases have been feeding insurer profits, not paying for health care costs. “The report finds that the top five largest for-profit insurance companies increased their profits by $12.2 billion last year while dropping coverage for 2.7 million Americans.“ Pending the investigation and a review from the California Insurance Commissioner, WellPoint has postponed the hikes until May 1, 2010.
At the end of the interview, the Fox hosts chuckled with the WellPoint VP. They apologized for being so harsh and warmly reminded Fluegel that their criticism of insurer profits was only meant to be “warm up” for Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) investigation. “You did very good,” cooed one of the cohosts.
AP reports that insurance companies in at least four states are raising their premiums for individual insurance policies (those that people have to buy themselves, because they don't get coverage from an employer) by 15% or more. To give you a sense of what we are talking about if these rates go into effect, a family of four in Maine (which is a relatively poor state) can expect to pay $1,876 a month--about $22,500 a year--for health insurance, starting in July.
And this is just the beginning of what we can expect to see pretty much everywhere:
Premiums are far more volatile for individual policies than for those bought by employers and other large groups, which have bargaining clout and a sizable pool of people among which to spread risk. As more people have lost jobs, many who are healthy have decided to go without health insurance or get a bare-bones, high-deductible policy, reducing the amount of premiums insurers receive.
Steep rate hikes in this sliver of the insurance market — about 13 million Americans, as of 2008 — have popped up sporadically for years. Experts see them becoming increasingly common.
"You're going to see rate increases of 20, 25, 30 percent" for individual health policies in the near term, Sandy Praeger, chairwoman of the health insurance and managed care committee for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, predicted Friday.
I'm just some guy who reads blogs that privilege correct information over incorrect information. Consider this a better-blog clipping service of my favorite stories.
Attendees at a conservative conference in town this week will have the opportunity to whack a pinata of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Conservative Political Action Conference “CPAC” begins Thursday here in D.C. and will feature a party Friday evening where guests will have the opportunity to whack a Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pinata. 
