Politics

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More Budget Talk: The Deficit

After I posted yesterday, I started thinking about the deficit that the Republican’s are always yammering on about.  I found this chart.

 

 

This analysis is from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities based on information from the Congressional Budget Office.

 So even if we don’t stop spending the the Wars, if we end the Bush tax cuts, we could fund all kinds of new stimulus programs (like COPS and education programs) that could help prevent more layoffs in the public sector,  fix medicare and social security and still begin to pay off the debt.  We might even extend umemployment benefits and fund programs to help unemployed homeowners save their property from foreclosure. 

The question for 2012 is how to convince people that the Ryan budget, endorsed by all the Republican candidates and most Republican members of Congress, will actually increase the projected defict by maintaining the tax cuts.

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Being Liberal or not being Glenn Beck

Being a bit behind in my reading (as always), I picked up The Nation from November 22 a few days ago to read Patricia Williams’ column, Veritas-iness and the American Way.  This started a train of thought about education, reading, why so many followers of popular conservatives are uneducated and how much of a threat this is to the American experiment. It also got me thinking about why being liberal became a bad thing.  Somewhere in recent history “liberals” became “progressives”.

According to my 11th Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the first definition of liberal is related to education, “of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts”.  The archaic meaning if “of or befitting a man of free birth”.  More current meanings include “marked by generosity” and “broad-minded esp: not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms.”  The entry goes on to explain “Liberal suggests openhandedness in the giver and largeness in the thing or amount given…”  From these meanings the political philosophy of liberalism was born.  Liberalism being defined as “a political philosophy based on a belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.”  On the other hand, a conservative is defined as “tending to disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions.”  Conservatism is “a disposition in politics to preserve what is established.”

Conservative and liberal.  These are two tensions that should complement each other.  But liberal has become synonymous for the over education elite who want to move away from the traditions of our Founders and the True Meaning of the Constitution. (my caps)  Is this because somehow our education system has failed?

Patricia Williams points out

Sadly, American education has suffered a miserable decline since those days.[when she went to public schools] According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, we are fifteenth in reading literacy, twenty-first in science literacy and twenty-fifth in math literacy. This slide was largely accomplished by a calculated disinvestment in public education that began with the anti-tax movement of the late 1970s. California, where that movement began with a series of ballot initiatives, had one of the best school systems in the world. It now ranks almost dead last here, just above Mississippi.

There’s a curious tension in politics between the popular hunger for better schooling and widespread resentment of those who actually find it. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have built a movement around the felt dispossession of those who don’t read newspapers, whose spelling is nonstandard and who cite Shakespeare to “refudiate” book-learning. Beck, who sniffs that public schools should be abolished altogether, exploits this ambivalence brilliantly by establishing his online Beck University, whose basic courses are Faith 101, 102 and 103; Hope 101, 102 and 103; and Charity 101, 102 and 103. Yet Beck U. also has a coat of arms with a numbingly lofty motto: Tyrannis Seditio, Obsequium Deo.

Here is one of Beck’s diagrams copied from AlterNet.

Being one of the over-educated liberals, I find the diagram incoherent and the connections based on a lack of understanding.  Does Glenn Beck understand that George Soros who is the heart of the “obam a pocalypse” help finance movements to overthrow oppressive governments in Eastern Europe? Or that he grew up in Nazi occupied Hungary? So yes, he has a connection to Hitler, but not the kind Beck wants to imply.  And Ivan Jones? 

Williams describes the crowd at the Steward-Colbert rally this way

…While Stewart and Colbert expressly appealed to “the busy majority” of reasonable, middle-of-the-road, somewhat-stressed-but-not-given-to-hysterics people, the signs among the masses were deeply inflected by class consciousness and the national educational divide. Some were relatively subtle: Which Way to Whole Foods? and Anyone for Scrabble Later? Others more overtly referenced Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor: Every Word on This Sign Is Spelled Correctly; I &heart; Evidence-Based Policies; and my favorite: If You Don’t Believe in Government Perhaps You Shouldn’t Run for It.

This was a crowd that listens to NPR (Kiss Me, Nina Totenberg!). It was racially and ethnically diverse ( Fox Told Me I Am a Terrorist). Their humor was sophisticated ( I Clutch My Purse When I See Juan Williams Coming). It was a throng of New York Times readers who eat bagels and peruse the Book Review. They marched with Kindles in hand, and their Patagonia backpacks contained novels by Anna Quindlen and essay collections like David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil and Other First World Problems.

If this sounds like a litany of class markers, we need to remember that class and education are not necessary correlates. This was a population of very diverse Americans who equate political sanity with studiousness and curiosity. It was a gathering of people fluent in subtlety and satire, tolerance and tact; who saw similarity in differences and differences among the similar; who appreciated metaphors, analogical thinking and the discipline of data. This is the opposite of fundamentalism. And it ought to be the very essence of American identity, for we can have no broad civic culture without it. Unfortunately these critical capacities are also the hallmarks of a good liberal arts education, which is increasingly unavailable to any but the very well-off. (The State University of New York, Albany, just announced that it may eliminate its Latin, French, Italian, Russian and theater degree programs.)

Why bother with the nuances of analytical thought? Consider this—recently State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley tweeted: “Happy birthday President #Ahmadinejad. Celebrate by sending Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer home” and “Your 54th year was full of lost opportunities. Hope in your 55th year you will open #Iran to a different relationship with the world.” Sarah Palin tweeted back: “Happy B’day Ahmadinejad wish sent by US Govt. Mind boggling foreign policy: kowtow & coddle enemies; snub allies. Obama Doctrine is nonsense.” This is not merely a lack of irony; it is a form of illiteracy, the kind of flat, childish reading that grasps the basic meaning of each word but not what they mean together.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are frightening in their ignorance and I worry that the ignorance is spreading faster than we can stop it.  The problem in the United States today is not the divide between liberalism and conservative:  that tension has existed since the founding of the country.  The problem is the divide between those who can read and comprehend and those who can’t.  I am not talking here about the quality of the inner city elementary school, although that too is an issue, I am talking about people who are supposed to be educated and still can’t really read and when they do don’t understand what it is they read.  True conservatives should be just as worried about them as liberals like me.

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Congresswoman Giffords, violence, rhetoric and other thoughts

Happy 2011!  I had made a resolution to post at least once a week this year and am already behind.  I have had a difficult fall with lots of energy sapping family and work issues.  It also didn’t help that for someone like me, the political news was depressing.  There were a number of bright spots including the Massachusetts election, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t tell, and ratification of START.  But overall it was pretty bleak.

But watching the first week of the new House was most entertaining.  At least it was until Saturday.

Bob and I were driving back from western Mass after a day of packing up my mother’s old apartment and when we got to Worcester, I turned on the NPR station to see if there were any news.  That was how we heard about Congresswoman Giffords, Judge Roll and the others who were shot and wounded.  I think that the assassination or attempted assassination of any political figure regardless of party or political philosophy is horrendous.  But this shooting is the culmination of the violence advocated by the radical right of the Republican party and the Tea Party Movement.

The first official to put the blame squarely where it belongs was Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff.  Sheriff Dupnik was blunt.  He was quoted in the Washington Post

There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol,” he said during his televised remarks. “People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.

He went on to say

It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included,” Sheriff Dupnik said. “That’s the sad thing about what’s going on in America: pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.

So let’s look at some actual facts since the Republicans and the Tea Party appear to be painting themselves as victims of the liberal media and claim no responsibility of what happened.

First it is a fact that Sarah Palin posted a map with cross-hairs over the Congressional Districts of 20 Democratic Congresspersons including Giffiords.  She remarked on the fact last year.

Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

The image is no longer on the Web site, and Ms. Palin posted a statement saying “my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.” (Late Saturday, the map was still on Ms. Palin’s Facebook page.)

Second, her office in Tuscon was vandalized after her vote in favor of Health Care Reform.  And both she and Judge Roll received threats. 

Third, her opponent in last November’s Congressional race held an event.  This information is from the blog, Firedoglake.

Kelly’s website has apparently scrubbed the event , but here is the account from the Arizona Daily Star:

Jesse Kelly, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be bothered in the least by the Sarah Palin controversy earlier this year, when she released a list of targeted races in crosshairs, urging followers to “reload” and “aim” for Democrats. Critics said she was inciting violence.

He seems to be embracing his fellow tea partier’s idea. Kelly’s campaign event website has a stern-looking photo of the former Marine in military garb holding his weapon. It includes the headline: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

The event costs $50

I’m sure I will have much more to say on all of this as time goes on but I want to end with this from Paul Krugman’s column today.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

And this sums it all up.

Dan Wasserman

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About November 2nd

Actually the election was better than I thought it would be.  Here in Massachusetts the Democrats swept the Constitutional offices and proved that there was no enthusiasm gap – or if there was one it was on the Republican side.  The Democrats proved that old fashioned shoe leather is still the way to get out the vote.  The turnout was very good for a mid-term election in my precinct where Charlie Baker got all of 19 votes out of 433 voters.  Equally significant the two most important propositions got voted down.  We kept affordable housing laws on the books and didn’t reduce the sales tax.  But remember we also voted for George McGovern.

I have mixed emotions about the scene nationally.  On one hand, it probably means nothing will get done legislatively until after the 2012 Presidential election is over.  We can only hope that Congress musters the votes for a continuing resolution on the budget.  On the hand, it will be very entertaining to watch the Republicans try to deal with dissent in their party as the election of Rand Paul and others means the end to the lockstep voting of Republicans in Congress.  And given what is happening in recent European elections, particularly the Conservative take-over in England (and while we are talking, can someone please explain to me why the Liberal Dems there are in a coalition with them?) we shouldn’t be surprised that the Republican-Tea Party coalition won.  But how bad is it really?

There was a 60 vote swing in the House.  But remember that before the election the Democrats held 255 seats.  After the election the Republicans hold 239.  Even if all 8 still undecided races break Republican, they will hold 247 seats.  So yes, there was a huge swing, the biggest since, I believe since the Truman mid-terms, but even so, the new Republican majority is not as large as the Democratic one before the election.  And I was very sorry to see my old friend, Rick Boucher, lose in Virginia as part of the wave.  

The pre-election talk was a 9 seat pick-up in the Senate for the Republicans.  Pundits on both sides were saying that the Republicans would have had the 10 seats to take over if not for Christine O’Donnell getting the Delaware nomination.  But the gain is only 6 with Alaska still undecided.  The Democrats still hold 53 seats in the Senate.  Maybe Harry Reid can figure out a way to change the Senate rules to a majority instead of 60 votes.

Joshua Holland has a great piece posted on AlterNet titled “It’s Not the End of the World — 7 Things Progressives Need to Keep in Mind about Last Night’s GOP ‘Wave”.

Here are a few of those 7 things.

2. The electorate is hopping mad, but they still dislike Republicans. A month before an election that has swept some rather extreme GOPers into Congress, an Associated Press-GfK Poll found that “60 percent disapprove of the job congressional Democrats are doing — yet 68 percent frown on how Republicans are performing.”

A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that while a majority of Americans voted GOP yesterday, the electorate “continues to have a more favorable opinion of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party, with 46 percent favoring Democrats and 41 favoring Republicans.”

This will be the third consecutive year in which the party out of power wins. That’s not a measure of the country’s ideological leanings, it’s a sign that people are hurting and are mad as hell about it (in case one needed such a sign).

3. Blue Dogs took the brunt of it. The loss of Wisconsin’s liberal lion, Russ Feingold, is a blow to the progressive movement. Alan Grayson’s defeat in Florida hurts. Other good lawmakers were booted out of office last night as well. But in many cases, what we saw were conservatives with Ds next to their names replaced with conservatives with Rs.

That’s to be expected after two big Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008. They won in a lot of conservative districts, but as many observers noted at the time, many of those Dems winning in marginally “red” districts were the bluest of dogs, who have not exactly helped advance a progressive agenda.

In his new book, Ari Berman argues that a smaller, more ideologically coherent Democratic party would in fact be good for progressives. Whether or not one agrees, it’s hard to see a bunch of the most corporate-friendly Dems losing their seats as a tragedy for American progressivism.

5.  A wave of low-information voters says more about our media and education system than our politics. In late July, a much discussed poll revealed that only 42 percent of Republican primary voters were confident President Obama was born in the United States. Compare that to 77 percent of the electorate at large.

It’s important to remember that many Tea Partiers are voting in an alternative universe where the decidedly centrist Dems are stealthily pushing the nation toward socialism, trying to enact Sharia law, taking over broad swaths of the economy, setting up “death panels” to decide if grandma lives or dies and plotting to join the United States with Canada and Mexico.

Given those beliefs, it’s really no surprise they’re so animated to “take their country back.” But all of that is a testament to the power of the Right’s mighty Wurlitzer, and says little about the state of our political beliefs.

So right now, I’m going to sit back and watch the Republican Party try to reign in Michele Bachmann and Rand Paul and the expectations of the people who voted for them that the world will now run their way while I hope that the President and the Democrats stick to their principles and don’t compromise them away.  We don’t need them to become the equivalent of the English Liberal Dems.

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The case for ending tax cuts

This week Kenneth Feinberg announced the list of banks that took tax payer money while paying our huge bonuses.  On NPR, John Ydstie reported that

In the fall of 2008, with the financial system on the verge of collapse, 17 large banks that were being propped up by taxpayers doled out $1.6 billion in bonuses.

On Friday, the Obama administration’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, passed judgment.

According to Feinberg, “…many were over $10 million per individual.”

And what exactly have these individuals done with their bonuses?  Have they created jobs?  I don’t think so.

Which brings me to the tax cut which is looming as the next hot potato for the Democrats and for President Obama.  We all remember the conversation the President had with Joe the Plumber during the campaign during which Obama, who clearly thought he was talking with someone rational, tried to explain that he was not going to raise taxes on the middle class.

The New York Times reports

Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama, say they are intent on letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire as scheduled at the end of this year. But they have pledged to continue the lower tax rates for individuals earning less than $200,000 and families earning less than $250,000 — what Democrats call the middle class.

Most Republicans want to extend the tax cuts for everyone, and some Democrats agree, saying it would be unwise to raise taxes on anyone while the economy remains weak. If no action is taken, taxes on income, dividends, capital gains and estates would all rise.

…

We do not buy into the theory that because the economy is still recovering, extending tax cuts for the highest earners is a necessary or effective policy response,” said Gene Sperling, counselor to Mr. Geithner.

“While we are supporting measures like small-business lending and tax cuts to spark growth,” Mr. Sperling added, “it is also important to show the world that we are following through on our commitment to long-term fiscal discipline.”

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont makes the case for the change in the Nation.

The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.

And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

 But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

The New York Times story points out how difficult changing the tax policy will be as it will involve many different element.

Congress must also wrestle with the estate tax, which lapsed last year but will automatically be reinstated effectively at a 55 percent rate on Jan. 1 for estates larger than $1 million. Lawmakers must also deal with an array of other provisions, including tax rates on dividends and capital gains, and the Alternative Minimum Tax, which has been adjusted annually to prevent millions of middle-class families from paying higher tax bills. The child tax credit would also be reduced.

So what should the strategy be?

Negotiations are expected to start in the Senate, where it is hardest for Democrats to advance legislation because of Republican filibusters. But some Democrats say a fallback plan would be to have their larger majority in the House approve a continuation of the lower rates just for the middle class right before the election, almost daring Republicans to oppose them.

In that case, Democrats say, Republicans who opposed the bill would be blocking a tax cut for more than 95 percent of Americans to defend tax cuts for a relatively few wealthy households. Republicans are readying an arsenal of economic data to portray the Democrats as endangering the precarious recovery and harming small-business owners, some of whom are taxed at the top personal income tax rates.

…

But some lawmakers, including Mr. Wyden, [Senator from Oregon] say the deficit concerns and the attention on the debt commission could help forge a deal: a short-term continuation of the tax cuts for the middle class, and perhaps some new tax breaks for businesses, that would buy lawmakers time to undertake a broad overhaul of the tax code in the next Congress.

It will be interesting to see if a change for the middle class can be made before the election and even more interesting to see what the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reports in December.

I am not an economist, but won’t the revenue generated by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations making over a certain amount – or that off shore their jobs-  help the deficit?   And I wonder if some are not actually paying more on their unemployment than those bankers are on their bonuses?

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Bayh Quits and will there be a Senator Mellencamp?

 Evan Bayh decided to call it quits in a decidedly weird and sudden way yesterday.  According to the New York Times Caucus Blog

The decision, which he announced at an afternoon press conference, came as a surprise to Democrats in his state who had already started working on his campaign.

…

In his remarks, Mr. Bayh expressed frustration at what he described as an increasingly polarized atmosphere in Washington that made it impossible to get anything done.

“For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should,” he said. “There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem solving.”

And while he complimented his colleagues in the Senate, he said that “the institution is in need of significant reform.”

He cited two recent examples of the Senate not stepping up – the voting down of a bipartisan commission to deal with the federal deficit and the stymied attempt to craft a jobs bill.

And so the Democrats will lose the Senator “least likely to vote with his party this Congress.”

The scramble to replace him on the ballot in the fall is on.  The deadline for filing to get on the ballot was today.  (Nice timing there Senator!) and no Democrat qualified.  I don’t know Indiana politics, but it seems unlikely that the primary date and thus the filing date will be moved.  So the state Dems say they can choose their candidate. 

Again, the Times

Now Democrats say they can select their choice, and attention has focused mainly on Representative Brad Ellsworth, a Democrat from Evansville, as well as Representative Baron Hill, Democrat of Seymour. Party officials say they are also exploring other, less well-known names.

One problem is that both Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Hill plan to qualify this week as House candidates. Republicans say it will not be proper if they do so only to later pull out to run for Senate, leaving Republicans with their House and Senate candidates while Democrats play political musical chairs.

To Republicans, that approach is not quite fair and means that Democrats could actually gain some advantage by Mr. Bayh pulling out just before the deadline for qualifying and allowing Democrats to avoid a Senate primary.

Got that?  If the Republicans are right, maybe Mr. Least Likely to vote with the Dems has actually done something right.

John Nichols over at the Nation is reporting a rumor that some in Indiana are promoting John Mellencamp for Senate. 

The guy who put populist politics on the charts with a song title “Pink Houses” John Mellencamp performed at the White House last week, as part of a program titled: “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”

The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame member sang the song “Jim Crow” with veteran folkie Joan Baez — as well as a terrific song version of “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” — on a night that also featured performances by Smokey Robinson, Natalie Cole, Yolanda Adams, the Five Blind Boys from Alabama and Bob Dylan, among others.

That was powerful company, but Mellencamp was up to it.

For the past quarter century, he has been penning and performing smart, often very political songs — focusing on the farm crisis, economic hard times and race relations. He’s been a key organizer of Farm Aid and other fund-raising events for good causes, and he’s been a steady presence on the campaign trail in recent years, appearing at the side of numerous Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama.

So, could Mellencamp perform in the U.S. Senate?

Could he be the right replacement for retiring Senator Evan Bayh, D-Indiana?

Don’t forget that Minnesota just elected Al Franken. 

Mellencamp certainly has the home-state credibility. Few rockers have been so closely associated with a state as Mellencamp with Indiana.

Mellencamp has a history of issue-oriented political engagement that is the rival of any of the Democratic politicians who are being considered as possible Bayh replacements.

And Mellencamp has something else. He has a record of standing up for disenfranchised and disenchanted working-class families in places like his hometown of Seymour, Indiana.

In other words, he’s worthy of the consideration that has led to talk of a “Draft John Mellencamp” movement. In fact, he might be just enough of an outlier to energize base votes and to make independent voters look again at the Democratic column.

Could we end up with Senators Franken and Mellencamp? We can dream anyway.

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Election Chatter

It appears that while Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon have made the mayoral race here in Boston interesting, Thomas Menino, who has been Mayor for 16 years, will win again.  This is according to polls out over the weekend.  The debate tonight between Menino and Flaherty should be the final deciding factor.  As far as City Council goes, there are a number of interesting folks running – most of them young.  Hard to predict the 4 at-large winners.

Jon Corzine is likely to get reelected in New Jersey.  But the Democratic candidate in Virginia, Creigh Deeds, is likely to lose despite the Washington Post endorsement.  His opponent is Bob McDonnell is what I would call a right-wing religious nutcase who has written about a woman’s place.

If you live in Virginia and you’re planning to vote for governor in November, if you happen to be between ages 18 and 44 and you also just happen to be a woman, gubernatorial candidate R. Creigh Deeds has something he’d like to talk to you about.

It has to do with a certain graduate school thesis written by Deeds’s opponent, Robert F. McDonnell, in 1989. McDonnell wrote about how to use public policy to strengthen the traditional family and said that working women and feminism were “detrimental” to the family.

While this provided a surge for Deeds in September, it doesn’t look as if the surge is holding.  Of course, I know from having lived in Virginia working state government is like being on a roller coaster:  Democratic governors seems to care for state workers (and for Virginians who need their services) while Republicans do not.  And the Virginia electorate seems to need periodic reminders about how bad governors like George Allen are for the Commonwealth.

But the most interesting election news is the Pew Research Center poll about Obama.  A few days ago, Paul Krugman had an interesting post about the midterm (2010) elections.  I think most experts believe that the Democrats  will lose some seats, but not control of either the House or Senate.  

Lots of buzz about the possibility that 2010 will be another 1994, with the triumphant conservative majority sweeping back into its rightful place of power. And of course, anything is possible.

But the signs really don’t point to that.

You can obsess, if you like, about the generic Congressional ballot — but historical patterns suggest that this ballot is meaningless at this early date.

If we look at Obama’s personal position, it seems to have stabilized — and as the Pew people point out, he’s in relatively good shape:

 

DESCRIPTIONPew Research Center

 

And there’s one more thing which I think matters: Republicans don’t have anything positive to sell.

I think the Republicans are being too optimistic and the Democrats a little gun shy.  The Democrats should move on, pass health care reform with a public option and give people a meaningful reason to vote for them.

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Nan Robertson

I’m sure there will be many words written about Nan Robertson and her personal struggles with toxic shock and alcoholism, but I read today about her death with a tinge of sadness.  Nan Robertson is responsible for what may be my only appearance (other than as a comentator on blogs) in the New York Times.

It was Miami 1972.  I a proud McGovern delegate to the Democratic National Convention.  She stopped me as I was making my way onto the floor and asked if she could interview me for a story about what women were wearing at the convention.  Mind you, I’ve never been a fashionista, but I was young and flattered.   I don’t have the link to that old article, but I have a copy. (Page 48, July 12, 1972)

Maya Hasegawa, a 25-year-old, tiny delegate from Richmond, Va, had suited up in a tank top and pants, with sunglasses perched atop her glossy locks.  “I’ve been marching since I was 13 years old,” she said proudly, “I’ve been very active in the peace and civil rights movements.”

And there is a picture of me, too – a head shot.  Everyone I know was excited.  And she spelled my name correctly which made my family happy.

She didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize for writing that paragraph about me, she won for her New York Times Magazine article about toxic shock which she suffer in 1981 .

The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in the partial amputation of eight fingers:
I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.

“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”

But I admired her book The Girls in the Balcony most of all. 

Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.

Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”

…

In 1963, Ms. Robertson began a decade as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times, where, as she said in an interview many years later, her de facto job description was to cover the “first lady, her children and their dogs.” Her years in Washington would furnish her with the title of “The Girls in the Balcony,” a reference to the cramped, second-story space in the National Press Club to which female journalists were then relegated.

“The Girls in the Balcony” was an account of the events surrounding Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times, a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times over inequities including pay, assignments and advancement. (Ms. Robertson was not among the seven named plaintiffs in the suit.) In 1978, the suit was settled out of court for $350,000, with The Times agreeing to an affirmative-action plan.

(Nan Robertson in 1982 at the Times.)

Nan Roberton may have been sent to cover fashion at the 1972 Convention and give me a monment of fame, but she will be remembered by me  for very much more than that.

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Health Care: A couple of things to think about

I’m like most Americans:  I have employer paid health care with pretty decent coverage and better than average care.  I belong to a doctor run HMO.  I like my primary care doctor who shares my philosophy that less can be more when it comes to drugs, but she makes sure that I get all the necessary tests amd tracks the results which I can see online.  But the cost of my coverage keeps going up and what I contribute to the cost will be a big part of our next union negotiations.

So this whole debate about reform boils down to two things for me.  First, can care be provided more efficiently and at less cost for everyone.  Two, we need to solve the question of the uninsured because we all pay when they use the emergency room for care. 

I live in Massachusetts and we have made a stab at universal coverage which is now under a great deal of pressure given the fiscal situation for the state.  But one thing I have observed is that without national reform on things like Medicare and Medicaid, states will have trouble balancing coverage with cost.  Somehow we have to control costs and improve quality.  I posted about this in my piece on Health Care as a Subprime Mortgage.

So here are a couple of other things to consider.  Nate Silver  did an analysis of where the largest concentrations of uninsured are living. 

Throughout last year, Gallup included a module on health and well being in their standard tracking surveys. This meant they had tens of thousands of interviews between all 435 Congressional Districts. One of the questions on the well-being module was about whether or not people had health insurance. Eric Nielsen at Gallup was kind enough, a while back, to send me these results broken down by Congressional District.

The median Congressional District has an uninsured population of 14.6 percent, according to Gallup’s data (the average is slightly higher at 15.5 percent). Of the 48 McCainocrat districts, 31 (roughly two-thirds) have an above-median number of uninsured. A complete list follows below (actual Blue Dogs are denoted in … you guessed it … blue):

 

So why are the blue dog Democrats so unwilling to vote for reform? 

 The second thing to consider is the Dennis Kucinich amendment.  Joshua Holland writes on Alternet

No time today for a lengthy analysis of the Tri-Committee health bill. My quick-and-dirty take is this. Those who think the bill is a wonderful progressive victory with a robust public option are wrong, and, on the flip side, the charge that it’s a “bailout for the insurance industry” is totally divorced from what the bill would actually do if passed.

 It is the most progressive, comprehensive and significant health care legislation to come down the pike since Medicare was passed in 1965. If it were enacted as written, it’d go a long way to solving a lot of our problems (but by no means all) and wouldn’t break the bank in the process.

 But it also fails some of the basic criteria that most progressives have long said is a red-line that can’t be crossed. First and foremost, it doesn’t have a public option that can compete with private insurers and result in significant cost savings. 

Enter the Kucinich Amendment,

Obviously, a public insurance plan for which 10 million are eligible to enroll isn’t going to serve as an example of the efficiency that comes with a single-payer type system. And the fact that they designed a pretty good public option for which most of the public will be ineligible to enroll (and that wouldn’t have as much potential for cost savings as one would hope) was enough to make me consider opposing it. Howard Dean told me recently that he thought a bill without a robust public option wasn’t worth passing, and I agree.

 And that’s where Kucinich, a supporter of single-payer, comes in. He’s trying to save the whole promise of this project.

 On Friday, an amendment he authored was added to the House bill that allows states to create their own single-payer systems instead of adopting the federally-run exchange system. The original bill allowed states only to enact their own exchange system — it was a nod to federalism — with the proviso that if a state (think a deep red one in the South) refused to adopt the plan, the feds could step in and set it up.

 The Kucinich amendment is really key. If it were to survive the legislative sausage-making and be enacted into law, the we might expect a progressive state to take advantage of the opportunity and enact a single-payer system in the coming years. And, if those of us who have been pushing such an arrangement are correct, the result will be greater access and better outcomes at a lower price tag for that state’s residents. 

Health care reform is going to cost us, but I think doing nothing will cost more in the long run.  I am looking forward to President Obama’s Wednesday press conference where this will probably be topic A.  Stay ‘tooned.

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Sonia Sotomayor and Senator Graham

Let’s look at this exchange as published in the Washington Post

GRAHAM: Now, during your time as an advocate, do you understand identity politics? What is identity politics?

SOTOMAYOR: Politics based simply on a person’s characteristics, generally referred to either race or ethnicity or gender, religion. It is politics based on . . .

GRAHAM: Do you embrace identity politics personally?

SOTOMAYOR: Personally, I don’t as a judge in any way embrace it with respect to judging. As a person, I do believe that certain groups have and should express their views on whatever social issues may be out there. But as I understand the word “identity politics,” it’s usually denigrated because it suggests that individuals are not considering what’s best for America.

. . .

GRAHAM: Do you believe that your speeches properly read embrace identity politics?

SOTOMAYOR: I think my speeches embrace the concept that I just described, which is, groups, you have interests that you should seek to promote, what you’re doing is important in helping the community develop, participate, participate in the process of your community, participate in the process of helping to change the conditions you live in.

I don’t describe it as identity policies, because — politics — because it’s not that I’m advocating the groups do something illegal.

GRAHAM: Well, Judge, to be honest with you, your record as a judge has not been radical by any means. It’s, to me, left of center. But your speeches are disturbing, particularly to — to conservatives. . . . Those speeches to me suggested gender and racial affiliations in a way that a lot of us wonder: Will you take that line of thinking to the Supreme Court in these cases of first precedent?

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham is viewed as a bellwether for how large a majority of the Senate will vote for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The Republicans have spent most of their time over the last four days trying to figure out what makes Judge Sotomayor tick.  I think the answer is pretty simple:  Yes, she is a woman and yes, she is Latina and in her private time, she may volunteer for groups that advocate those causes.  But when she is a judge, she is not an advocate.   And that’s why none of you could find anything objectionable in any of her many decisions.  Isn’t that what you said you want from a judge?  Isn’t that why you were all upset about empathy?  Sonia Sotomayor has shown that she has empathy and that she rules according to the facts and the law.  I think that is what you said you wanted.