Question For Post-Partisans: Can We Get There By Leaving The Driving To The Same Ralph Kramdens Who Keep Running Us Off The Road?

Gene Sculatti is an old friend of mine. When I first met him he was the subversive executive inside the big scary major record label. He hired me to write articles in the Warner Bros inhouse magaizne and he flew me down to the company's redwood Burbank headquarters to introduce the company's apprehensive senior executives to DEVO. This is the first time Gene is writing for DWT. I'm over the moon.


by Gene Sculatti 
 
I probably shouldn’t be doing this. Writing in the heat of the moment, reacting to the news of Daschle removing himself from consideration for head of Secretary of Health & Human Services. But, jeez, how many times do we have to go through all this-- us, plain Americans, progressives, people of any party or none who want a long overdue turnaround? Is there an endless pool of Daschles out there, smiling pols who just darn forgot to pay a couple hundred grand in taxes, whose living expenses include $200,000 for a car and driver, who, having palmed bushels of healthcare-industry bread, are now to be entrusted with regulating that industry? Just what distinguishes these guys from the opposition party’s charlatan evangelists and Chamber of Commerce boot-lickers? Or is the real distinction not between parties but between all of their class and all of ours? We’re plebes, they’re privileged. One is reminded of Cheney’s rationale for his own right to reckless behaving: “It’s our due.”
 
And where’s Obama? I’m sitting here, like many others, without a full-time job or healthcare, desperate for the changes he and his party promised to implement, and he says he’s sorry, he “screwed up,” that “mistakes were made” in selecting-- or not properly vetting-- Daschle at this critical time. Can you beat that: he screwed up? Hey, pally, we all do, no biggie. (The Apologies of the Week feature on Harry Shearer’s Le Show radio program weekly revels in revealing this kabuki shuck for what it is: Someone’s caught with his pinkie in the Pepperidge Farm jar, he publicly begs forgiveness and it all goes away.)
 
No one’s saying Obama should be infallible in matters of faith and morals. But he did rather advertise himself that way (after one of the most corrupt administrations ever, how hard could it be to do better?). It’s just that so much is at stake now, this time, and he and his crew need to deliver, not dish us the same old slop. Daschle-- and Richardson and Geithner before that-- are black eyes that the Dems don’t need if they’re going to make good on any of their promises to fix things. Here, why not pass Mitch McConnell some fresh ammo?
 
I never thought B.O. walked on water. He made more sense than Hillary, made more of the right points than any Democratic candidate in my lifetime, so he got my vote, and I was touched and energized by his victory.
 
But then, maybe even without drinking the Kool-Aid, I fooled myself anyway.
 
When I was a kid in the early ’60s, growing up in Napa Valley, my dad and uncle used to watch TV wrestling. Sometimes they were joined by Lungo, a wop beanpole inclined toward the gullible. Each week, the villain wrestler would wind up pulling tricks behind the ref’s back and get the best of the hero wrestler. The audience would howl bloody murder. So would Lungo, jumping up and shaking his fist at the screen. Then my uncle would remind him that the whole match was staged, that nothing was really at stake and Lungo would agree, sit back down and settle in for Round Two. As soon as Ray Stevens would clobber Pepper Gomez with a hidden folding-chair, Lungo was up out of his seat, yelling, taken in all over again. 

No matter how hard we want to believe change is here and good’s about to win, we’ve got to be resolute about not being taken in-- by our own blindness or a party or a prez who says we can get there by leaving the driving to the same Ralph Kramdens who keep running us off the road.

UPDATE: Ray and Pepper? Or the real deal?

Daschle's Out-- How Will It Impact Health Care Reform?

Rootless, Inside-the-Beltway hacks all start acting like Republicans sooner or later

The nation's first post-partisan president is experiencing some speedbumps on the Post-partisan Express. As expected, John McCain announced he would oppose the Stimulus Package that Obama wants to use to fix all the problems caused by years and years of Republican economic and fiscal perfidy that McCain supported. And then Nancy Killefer's withdrawal for the new job at OMB, turned out to be the tipping point for Tom Daschle, who withdrew. Hopefully Obama won't nominate Bill Frist. I guess if he goes for Howard Dean he'd accomplish four things: teach his partisan enemies not to look a gift horse (Daschle) in the mouth, reinforce his commitment to keep lobbyists out of government (and that includes people married to lobbyists-- "Oh but I'm not in the Mafia, only my spouse is"), prod Rahm Emanuel into committing suicide, and-- if anyone really cares-- wind up with real health care reform, not the kitty cat version that Daschle envisioned.

Limbaugh and his cadre in Congress smell blood in the water and they're not into this whole post-partisan thing. Watch them go after Hilda Solis now-- and watch Obama run for cover... and lose the trust of the people who elected him. Next time, let's make sure we elect a partisan president to play in the shark infested waters.

Oh-- and here's the brand spanking new Howard Dean for HHS Facebook page. Expect all Inside-the-Beltway types to oppose this. Watch and you'll see who's trustworthy and who's not.

Obama And The Democratic Tax Scofflaws Making It Easier To Be An Anti-Family Republican

You learn a lot when you reside Inside-The-Beltway, none of it good

It pains me to see so many progressives making excuses for the tax scofflaws Obama has been appointing to high government posts. Obama talks about bringing high ethical standards to the sewer that is Washington's all pervasive culture of corruption but then makes exceptions when the crooks and lobbyists are Democrats. I don't like it on face value but, more important, I don't like the sleazy message it sends. It weakens Obama and it weakens his nominees and it weakens the Democratic Party when the president starts acting like a Republican. And an apology to equally corrupt fellow Insiders doesn't help one bit.

This morning one of the most corrupt members of the Senate, South Carolina extremist and obstructionist Jim DeMint was on TV asking what would senators have said if one of Bush's nominees had had the tax avoidance problems Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle had. The work that Geithner and Daschle have to do is now compromised by the distrust that citizens will have in them. I was very proud when Russ Feingold and a small handful of other progressives voted against confirming Geithner because of, at least, the appearance of wrongdoing on his taxes. Senator Feingold:

I am deeply troubled by his failure to pay the payroll taxes he owed, despite repeated alerts from his employer at the time, the International Monetary Fund, that he was responsible for paying those taxes. Moreover, his earlier interactions with the Internal Revenue Service over his failure to pay sufficient payroll taxes for his household employees make Mr. Geithner's explanations of his failure to pay his own payroll taxes even less satisfactory. The failure to comply with our nation's tax laws would be problematic for any Cabinet nominee, but it is especially disturbing when it involves the individual who will be charged with overseeing the enforcement of our tax laws.

Predictably the arch-obstructionists, led by DeMint, also voted against confirmation, although for them tax avoidance-- something they normally hand out awards for-- was just an excuse. Recently the upright Senator DeMint, dripping in hypocrisy, was fined by the FEC for taking immense bribes. Had the investigation been pressed the way it should have been, he might be in prison instead of the Senate. DeMint is a fanatic for abolishing the IRS and all forms of federal income tax and all kinds of progressive taxation. It is no coincidence that the member of Congress with the worst voting record on issues affecting the middle class wants to replace progressive taxation with a regressive tax system (a 23% national sales tax) which shifts the tax burden even further from the wealthy and onto the backs of the middle class. This is the man who hysterically warned South Carolina voters that if car makers were bailed out America would see rioting in the streets. Perhaps he was thinking of the Brooks Bros Riot in West Palm Beach that was a key to the coup d'etat that brought Bush to power in 2000.

DeMint is not a man of good will and will use any weapon at his disposal to beat down American working families. It pains me to see President Obama now handing him an arsenal of weapons that he will be able to deploy against health care and against the Employee Free Choice Act and against fiscal reform. Because, in the end, that's exactly what will happen. Creating an environment of distrust between citizens and tax scofflaws in position of power will damage the ability to enact the serious proposals that are made.

"No wonder," drawled DeMint, "liberals want to raise taxes; they don't pay them anyway." With the far right busy rewriting history and pushing their bizarre revised versions through their media outlets, the battle to turn this country around after 8 years of the Bush Tragedy, will be fierce and hard-fought. We may have elected a Democratic president-- albeit a "post-partisan" moderate-- and majorities in both houses of Congress, but the new Administration is shooting itself in the foot and tying one arm behind its back by elevating men, like Tom Daschle, who appear to be crooks. He's a millionaire with a lobbyist wife who doesn't pay his taxes. Isn't that what we thought we were getting away from when we opposed a continuation of Bush in the form of McCain? Arizona's neo-fascist junior Senator, Jon Kyl, was parroting the same talking points today that DeMint and every other obstructionist has been given:

Kyl suggested that Obama is benefiting from his popularity and a double standard, and that President George W. Bush's nominees might not have survived similar mistakes.

"President Obama wanted to have a very ethical administration starting out and so on, but I think he's seeing how hard it is to avoid these kind of problems," Kyl said. "And I just wonder if President Bush had nominated these people, what folks would be saying about that."

They're so happy. And so lucky to be getting their weapons of mass destruction directly from the Obama Administration.


UPDATE: COLBERT'S PAL LYNN WESTMORELAND DEMANDS OBAMA PULL DASCHLE'S NAME

You know you're wrong if you're on the same side as Congress' most clueless, lugheaded bigot. And it's hard to figure out who that is-- with such a stunning array of Neanderthals from backward districts, where political acumen is directly measured by hours logged in listening to Limbaugh, Coulter and Hannity, running around Congress without their leashes. But no one would dispute that among the 5 most extreme right wing imbeciles in Congress-- the other four being Paul Broun (R-GA), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and Steve King (R-IA)-- sits Lynn Westmoreland, briefly a national laughing stock. Well, he's crawled out from under his rock again and is demanding that President Obama "pull Tom Daschle's nomination to be secretary of Health and Human Services, 'effective immediately.'" Hop right to that, Mr. President, 'cause Westmoreland has started a petition drive among all the kooks and nuts who make up the Republican House caucus. It's a post-partisan thing.

Working Too Closely With Republicans Is Toxic For Obama's Plans To Reform Health Care-- And Unhealthy For Americans

This looks like such a nice headline, doesn't it?-- Daschle Pledges a Bipartisan Reform of Health Care System. It isn't; instead, taken on face value at least, it's a disaster. As Jane Hamsher pointed out in her savvy defense of the Sanjay Gupta appointment yesterday, you can't always take all this political stuff at face value. Gupta's appointment, she asserts, is primarily ceremonial and is a smart move if it will help sell Obama's health care plan and counteract the certain and well-funded "Harry and Louise" style campaign by the Insurance and HMO giants aimed at tanking it. Of course, that begs the more important question of what, exactly, Daschle and Obama will have Gupta selling.

And that brings us back to this bipartisan reform headline. Can Daschle and Obama take the kinds of withering, vicious attacks reactionary interest groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Party have prepared for them? Neither was ever much of a trench fighter and each just wants to be loved (my their mortal enemies) and would rather just give in on points that are life and death for defenseless working families than cause too many ripples from the vested interests that run their comfortable little world.

Obama and his peeps better realize that Republicans and Blue Dog type Democrats have very different goals-- and serve very different interests, diametrically opposed interests-- than they do. “I really want to work in a collaborative way,” said Daschle. In that case, give up completely on improving health care for American working families. Remember, who the hell you're dealing with-- a selfish, racist, greed-and-bribery-obsessed bunch who turned down health insurance for needy children over and over again in the last two years.

Daschle said conversations with ordinary citizens and with business leaders had driven home the depth of the problems related to health care. He said he had been struck by findings that General Motors spends more on health care than it does on steel, and that Starbucks spends more on health care than it does on coffee.

Cut the crap, Daschle, Big Insurance, the #7 biggest briber of federal elected officials since 1990, spends more on political "donations" ($309,549,407 since then, 63% of it to Republicans) than it does on many catastrophic events it should be covering. And who has Big Insurance lavished the most love on, now in positions to make sure their interests are protected?

John McCain (R-AZ) $2,799,156
Barack Obama (D-IL) $2,184,670
Chris Dodd (D-CT) $2,138,446
Earl Pomeroy (Blue Dog-ND) $1,735,356
Charlie Rangel (D-NY) $1,346,785
Ben Nelson (D-NE) $1,185,299
Max Baucus (D-MT) $1,171,363
Joe Lieberman (I-CT) $1,033,802
Arlen Specter (R-PA) $1,007,130
Chuck Schumer (D-NY) $943,400
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) $918,007

Notwithstanding the friendly atmosphere on Thursday, and assuming that Mr. Daschle is confirmed, heated debates are certain about one of the most contentious aspects of President-elect Obama’s domestic agenda: his call for a new public health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.

No other proposal so clearly defines the political and philosophical differences between Mr. Obama and Republicans, or provokes such deep disagreements.

Mr. Daschle, the point man for Mr. Obama’s campaign to revamp the health care system, supports the concept of “a government-run insurance program modeled after Medicare.” It would, he says, give consumers, especially the uninsured, an alternative to commercial insurance offered by companies like Aetna, Humana and WellPoint.

But the proposal is anathema to many insurers, employers and Republicans. They say the government plan would have unfair advantages, like the ability to impose lower fees, and could eventually attract so many customers that private insurers would be driven from the market.

“The public plan option is a terrible idea-- one of our top concerns in the health reform debate,” said James P. Gelfand, senior manager of health policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

The public plan, as conceived by Mr. Obama, would vie with private insurers to provide better benefits and better customer service at a lower cost. Without such competition, Democrats say, private insurers cannot be expected to control costs much better than they do now.

Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, said the new option was essential to the success of Mr. Obama’s effort to rein in costs and make coverage available to all Americans.

“Public insurance has a better track record than private insurance when it comes to reining in costs while preserving access to care,” Mr. Hacker said. “The public plan would set a standard against which private plans must compete.”

Yesterday Think Progress did yeoman's work debunking right wing lies and propaganda about health care reform. Pointing out that extremists and greedy corporations have already started their smears and scare campaigns to confuse turn voters and turn them against health care reform, they're take apart one GOP myth about reform after another. Here are some of the lies you'll be hearing for the rest of the year-- plus the appropriate answers:

GOP Lie: Heath care reform will limit patient choice.

REALITY: Progressive reforms would provide more choice, not less. Under progressive proposals, Americans will have the choice to keep the employer plan they currently have or buy an affordable plan from the national insurance exchange. Individuals and small businesses will be able to “compare private coverage options and a public plan and to purchase the policy that would work best for them.”

GOP Lie: Americans will lose their existing coverage.

REALITY: Progressive proposals strengthen the employer based system by spreading the risk and cost of insurance. An employer mandate on larger employers will encourage companies to continue providing coverage and will make the process of providing insurance more affordable by spreading the costs of insurance. A majority of large American employers would continue to provide coverage as a competitive benefit, while businesses with the fewest workers and the lowest wages would be exempt from the mandate and offered a new tax credit to purchase health insurance for their employees.

GOP Lie: The government will ration care.

REALITY: Progressive proposals will allow Mom and her doctor to choose the best treatment for her cancer. Research into the comparative effectiveness of treatments can identify the procedures that provide the best results at the lowest cost. Currently, at least one-third of medical procedures have questionable benefits, according to the Rand Corporation.

GOP Lie: Affordable health care reform will create a government monopoly over health care.

REALITY: Progressive proposals for a public plan would create real choice and real competition, with all health plans focused on delivering better care at lower costs. According to the Urban Institute, “the presence of a well-run public plan would constrain private spending, as the plans would have to compete on price.” In fact, private insurers who “offer a superior product through high levels of efficiency, satisfaction in consumer preferences and ease of access to quality medical services” will thrive in a reformed market. The presence of a well-run and effective public plan will incentivize innovation in cost containment and service delivery.

GOP Lie: A new public program will only drive up health care costs and increase premiums.

REALITY: A public plan will contain costs, lower premiums, and give Americans a choice of health plans — public and private. A recent analysis of the public option by the Institute for America’s Future, concluded that offering a new public insurance option to Americans who lack coverage would control health care costs and improve quality by providing an important benchmark for private insurance within a reformed health care framework. Universal coverage will reduce cost-shifting by getting everybody covered and contain costs through investment in prevention, management of chronic care, twenty-first century information technology and research on and adoption of effective treatments.

A report released today by the Commonwealth Fund makes it clear that health care reform is is not going to break the bank and that it's "possible to insure all Americans without significantly raising total health spending... While Americans pay more per person for care than any other industrialized country, many studies show they have poorer health, suffer more medical mistakes and are generally less happy with their medical care."

GOP Lie: Being uninsured is not a problem; it's people's own fault.

REALITY: Americans are uninsured because they can’t afford the high costs of insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), most Americans who lack health insurance “come from working families and have low incomes.” About two-thirds of the uninsured “are poor or near poor” and are “less likely to be offered employer-sponsored coverage or to be able to afford to purchase their own coverage.”

GOP Lie: Deregulating the health care industry will solve the health crisis.

REALITY: The current marketplace is broken; it has failed to keep costs down and increase access to care. Rather than competing on the value of care, insurance markets have “become dominated by a small number of large insurers” that don’t use their market power to drive bargains with providers. The marketplace has contributed to skyrocketing premiums, huge cost-shifts to families through higher deductibles and copayments, and has largely excluded individuals with pre-existing conditions from coverage.

If Obama and his team don't understand that the Republican reactionaries and their Blue Dog allies are the mortal enemies of viable health care reform and that it can only happen despite them, not with their aid, we are doomed and could have just as well elected John McCain.