Later On

I must say that the weight-training exercises from Strong Women Stay Young (Revised Edition) tire me out much more than the Nordic does or the walking did. I think it’s because some of the workout (bicep curl, overhead press, upright row) use muscles that don’t get much use otherwise, whereas my leg muscles are reasonably strong. I’m very pleased to have the two-day rest after each session. (Thanks, TYD.) I’m not pushing the weights up too fast: Dr. Nelson gives good guidance on how to determine you’re not trying to do too much.

UPDATE: I no longer get so tired from the weights (1/3/2010). Maybe some strength and endurance are returning.

Interesting chart:

Off the back of the recent Climate Skeptics vs The Consensus image, we were curious how many scientists might make up ‘The Consensus’.

The Skeptical side claims 39,486 dissenters in their ranks, according to the PetitionProject.org. That sounds like a lot. But is it?

Also, the summary arguments are quite interesting.

Via Gina Trapani. Google Wave lets a group carry on a discussion, all together and as subgroups, with words, images, videos, sound, and so on. Take a look at this group’s developing conversation:

Gina points out:

It’s still not easy to explain what, exactly, Google Wave does and is, but it sure does make for some cool screencasts. Hit play for a Wave-powered trip through 2009. (If you liked this, see also Good Wave Hunting and Pulp Wave Fiction.)

Victoria McGrane in Politico:

Main Street has had a tough year, losing jobs and seeing little evidence of the economic revival that experts say has already begun.

But K Street is raking it in.

Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government — and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Many lobbying firms have escaped the worst of the corporate belt-tightening, thanks, in large part, to the ambitious agenda set out by President Barack Obama — who, ironically, came to Washington with a pledge to break what he considered the undue influence of special-interest lobbyists.

Plenty of sectors have scaled back their K Street spending, including traditional big spenders like real estate and telecommunications. But Obama’s push for legislation on health reform, financial reform and climate change has compensated for the grim economic times.

And that’s after Obama kicked off the year with a massive economic stimulus package — and every major business sector tried to get a piece of the action.

“Lobbyists love it … when you’ve got an activist agenda like this, and you’ve got serious problems like this, and people want to do something about it,” said James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

“It is the most active time that I have ever seen in the advocacy business — from 1973 on,” Thurber added.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lobbyist whose shop deals mostly with financial services and health care issues. “It’s been a tremendously busy year, and it’s going to keep getting that way,” the lobbyist said, noting that both health care and financial reform will remain active as congressional action moves from drafting legislation to implementation to the inevitable fixes…

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Jake Sherman in Politico:

A Congressional Research Service report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee says ACORN hasn’t violated any federal regulations the past five years.

The report, released by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers’s (D-Mich.) staff Tuesday evening, also reports that the undercover filmmakers that allegedly caught employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now breaking the law may have violated state law in their filming operation.

Separately on Tuesday, a New York federal judge rejected a motion from the Justice Department to reconsider a decision that ruled a bill that stopped funding for ACORN as an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

The CRS report is part of a slew of government inquests into the group, which was swept up in a number of embarrassing situations in the past several months. The Government Accountability Office recently opened its own report, and Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Steve King of Iowa have led the charge in demanding more investigations and hearings into the group.

ACORN has been under a cloud for several months. ACORN employees have been accused of voter registration fraud, and the organization has faced serious financial problems.

The CRS report, however, will give the organization’s backers some comfort and conservatives some ammo. It details that the, the beleaguered community group has received tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the past several fiscal years — including one $16 million grant and an additional grant worth $7.8 million. An ACORN aide noted that much of the money was to ACORN Housing, which is legally a separate entity.

Glenn Greenwald:

I’ve written many times before about Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years — where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera’s operations, not about Terrorism — and then suddenly released without explanation last year, as though the whole thing never happened.  The due-process-free imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. government was ignored almost completely by the American media (other than Nicholas Kristof), even as it righteously obsessed on the far shorter imprisonment of journalists by countries such as Iran and North Korea (hey, look over there at those tyrannical countries – they imprison our journalists!!!!!).  Aside from al-Hajj, we’ve imprisoned numerous other journalists without charges in Iraq — and continue to this day to do so — including ones who work for Reuters and the Associated Press.

Today, The New York Times‘ media reporter Brian Stelter profiles al-Hajj, who is now an on-air correspondent for Al Jazeera.  The article recounts the details of al-Hajj’s detention, his description of his torture, and the physical and psychological wounds he still suffers from his treatment at the hands of his American captors.  All things considered, the article is a decent effort to explain what happened, and Stelter deserves credit for bringing some desperately needed attention to this story.  Nonetheless, the article contains some rather striking and revealing passages, beginning with this:

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Sometimes I get tempted to blow smoke at the Right. For example, I just though of starting a rumor that Obama had asked the US Fish and Wildlife Service to add the brown recluse spider to the endangered species list, so that if you kill one you are liable for a fine and possible imprisonment. Anyone who accepts the idea that Obama was born in Kenya would swallow this hook, line, and sinker. But I’m not going to do it.

Interesting take:

We are clearly, finally in the health care reform bill end game. And we’ve got our reporting team fanned out across the scene, literally and figuratively, reporting out various aspects of the story for you. But there are a couple aspects of the story that seems most key to me now and which I want to flag your attention to.

First, everybody is on notice that the House is not going to be able to make any major changes to the senate bill. Nelson and Lieberman hold an effective veto on anything coming out of the House. By and large, everyone seems to get that. But there’s a broader fissure that needs to be addressed between the two chambers and that’s in many ways actually a proxy for the deeper ideological fracture within the Democratic party. Since the House is being forced to basically give way entirely to the senate, they need at least a fig leaf, something to preserve institutional and intra-party self-respect. Christina Bellantoni’s report this from the House side suggests the House Dems plan on grousing a lot on TV with the knowledge they’ll have to give way in the end. But this strikes me as a key question. Is that really going to be enough?

Again, I’m not talking about a serious litigating of the bill. But I think something’s going to be required to real get everyone on board with all of this. And I’m not sure we’ve yet seen what it is.

Next, opinions about President Obama. Sen. Feingold fairly publicly called the president out for helping kill the public option by not lobbying for it. Sen. Webb said something fairly similar. But Feingold is often and outlier in such things and Webb’s comment didn’t get much attention. That’s why it caught my attention when Sen. Harkin seemed to rise to the bait from Joe Lieberman, when the Connecticut senator announced that the White House hadn’t lobbied him on the Public Option after all. Now, Harkin got asked about this on TV yesterday. And he could have just played it off. But he didn’t. He expressed what seemed to be genuine surprise and was pretty clear about it. That’s why I had Brian Beutler follow up with Harkin this morning. He was clear to say that the White House hadn’t deceived him or other senators. But he was nonetheless surprised.

This is another issue I’m watching. I think Congressional Dems attitude toward Obama is sort of on a knife’s edge at the moment, especially in the Senate. Does this disappointment and upset coalesce and become more public? Or does a mix of excitement, relief or mere exhaustion wash it away and get replaced by a sense that as ugly as it all may have been Obama just passed the first major piece of progressive legislation in more than 40 years?

We pretty much know the big picture. In mid-late January the president signs a bill that looks pretty much like the bill that just came out of the senate, with some minor changes on the margin. How these questions come out is less clear to me.

From the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the keynote address at the Closing Plenary of the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security:

Your Majesties,
Prime Minister,
Distinguished Heads of State and Government,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Why have you invited me to speak here? Because terrorism is a threat to all states and to all peoples, which can strike anytime, anywhere.

It is a direct attack on the core values the United Nations stands for: the rule of law; the protection of civilians; mutual respect between people of different faiths and cultures; and peaceful resolution of conflict.

So of course the United Nations must be at the forefront in fighting against it, and first of all in proclaiming, loud and clear, that terrorism can never be accepted or justified, in any cause whatsoever.

By the same token, the United Nations must continue to insist that, in the fight against terrorism, we cannot compromise on the core values I have listed. In particular, human rights and the rule of law must always be respected. As I see it, terrorism is in itself a direct attack on human rights and the rule of law. If we sacrifice them in our response, we are handing a victory to the terrorists.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Since terrorism is clearly one of the major threats that we face in this century, it is only right that it received close attention in the report, “A More Secure World — Our Shared Responsibility”, produced by the High-level Panel that I set up to study global threats and recommend changes in the international system.

The Panel asked me to promote a principled, comprehensive strategy. I intend to do that. This seems to me a fitting occasion to set out the main elements of that strategy, and the role of the United Nations in it.

There are five elements, and I shall call them the “five D’s”. They are:

• first, to dissuade disaffected groups from choosing terrorism as a tactic to achieve their goals;
• second, to deny terrorists the means to carry out their attacks;
• third, to deter states from supporting terrorists;
• fourth, to develop state capacity to prevent terrorism;
• and fifth, to defend human rights in the struggle against terrorism.

The United Nations has already, for many years, been playing a crucial role in all these areas, and has achieved important successes. But we need to do more, and we must do better.

Let me start with the first D: dissuading disaffected groups from choosing terrorism as a tactic.

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A wonderful post at Culinate by Charlotte Freeman:

Last summer — nearly half a century after its initial publication — Julia Child’s classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking hit the top of the national bestseller charts. The phenomenon was, of course, driven by the late-summer (and now video) release of the movie "Julie & Julia," which I confess I have not yet seen, although I was an early and ardent supporter of Julie Powell’s blog, the Julie/Julia Project.

A flurry of articles immediately ensued: about how difficult it is to cook out of Mastering, and about the panic ensuing among ordinary cooks when confronted with the amounts of butter and cream called for in Child’s classic French recipes.

On the one hand, Regina Schrambling warned Slate readers not to buy the book, because “you’ll never cook from it.”

On the other hand, the very New York Times article in which Child’s bestseller status was announced also quoted a Florida woman who, horrified by the inclusion of salt pork in the famous boeuf bourguignonne recipe, decided that a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of French onion soup, and a can of red wine were acceptable substitutes.

“Yes, Julia Child rolled over in her grave when I opened the cream of mushroom soup,” Melissah Bruce-Weiner told the paper. “But you know what? That’s our world.”

Perhaps. But it’s also a world in which everyone seems to be missing the point of both Mastering the Art of French Cooking and of the Julie/Julia Project. Both were about mastery, not about everyday ease…

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I learned to make an excellent cheese soufflé from that book.

The Eldest recommended one of the best books that I’ve recently read: Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuściński. I highly recommend it. Here the start of a chapter, page 204. The text in italics is quoted from the Robin Waterfield translation of Herodotus, published by Oxford.

Before the defeated Xerxes pulls out of Europe and returns to Susa with his emaciated, sick, and starving forces (wherever they went and whatever people they encountered, they stole and at their crops. If there were no crops to be had, they ate grass and herbs they found growing in the ground, and bark and leaves they peeled or pulled off both wild trees and cultivated ones. They were so hungry that they left nothing untried. Moreover, they were ravaged by disease, and men were dying of dysentery through the journey. Xerxes also left sick troops in the care and maintenance of whichever community they had reached at that particular point of the march …), before all this happens, many other things will come to pass and much blood will be spilled.

There is a war going on, after all, one in which Persia is to conquer Greece—meaning Asia is to seize Europe, despotism is to destroy democracy, and slavery is to prevail against freedom.

At first, everything suggests that this will in fact occur, that it will be thus. The Persian army marches hundreds of kilometers into Europe without meeting any resistance. What is more, several small Greek states, fearing that such a great army’s victory is inevitable, surrender without a fight and join the Persian side. So Xerxes’ army grows even larger and more powerful as it advances. Having seized the barrier that was Thermopylae, Xerxes reaches Athens. He occupies and burns down the city. Yet while Athens lies in ruins, Greece still exists—and it will be saved by the genius of Themistocles.

Themistocles has just been chosen leader of Athens. This takes place at a difficult time, during a moment of great tension, because it is known that Xerxes is preparing an invasion. It so happens that just at that moment, Athens receives a large influx of funds generated by its silver mines in Laurium. The populists and the demagogues instantly feel the wind in their sails and come out with a slogan: Distribute it to all equally! Finally, everyone will have something, everyone will feel strong and secure. [Tax breaks, anyone? – LG]

But Themistocles acts sensibly and courageously. Athenians, he calls, come to your senses! The danger of annihilation hangs over our heads. Our only salvation, inst4ead of spreading that money about, is to build with it a strong fleet capable of resisting the Persian force!

Herodotus paints the picture of this great war of antiquity by means of contrasts: One the one side, from the East, comes surging an immense, powerful steamroller, a blind force subject to the despotic will of a king-master, a king-god. On the other side sprawls the scattered, internally quarrelsome Greek world, rife with disputes and antagonisms, a world of tribes and independent cities without a common government o bind them. Two urban centers, Athens and Sparta, rise to the top of this incoherent amalgam, and taken together, their relations and arrangements will determine the principal axis of ancient Greek history.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

BTW, precious little nutritive value in grass, tree leaves, and bark. That wasn’t just a defeat, that was close to obliteration.

Last night, after another post in which I blamed Obama for not getting more involved in the healthcare reform effort, taking to the bully pulpit to push the public option, jawboning members of Congress, and the like, I started to think about what would have happened if he had followed such advice.

First, a large block (say, 25% or more) of Americans hate Obama fiercely. A lot of people didn’t like Bill Clinton, of course, but you didn’t see posters of Clinton as Hitler. Some continue to believe that Obama was born in Kenya, even, and that his family presciently arranged for a birth notice of the baby’s birth to appear in a Hawaiian newspaper at the time so he could run for President of the US decades later. If they will believe that, they will believe anything, and they’re perfectly willing to make a lot of noise and follow orders (e.g., disrupting town-hall meetings).

So if Obama had become overtly involved, instead of remaining more or less on the sidelines, these people would have erupted with the fury of a volcano. That would not have affected any GOP votes in Congress, of course: the GOP has been the Party of No right down the line. But if there was a great public uproar, with lots of shouting and TV and email and phone calls, some of the borderline Democrats would undoubtedly have fallen away, and the effort would have failed.

What we have isn’t perfect, but a lot of people are now going to be able to get medical care who couldn’t before—and the broad array of pilot programs will probably, as it did for agriculture, improve productivity and cut costs. And if the progressive left were successful in killing the Senate bill (making common cause with the irrational Right), then I don’t think healthcare reform would come around for another decade or two. Especially with legislation, half a loaf is worth infinitely more than no bread, because over time the imperfect bill can be strengthened, augmented, and refined until we have something very good. For example, if this bill is passed and people start seeing the benefits to themselves, then we could come back in another Congress and work to pass a public option add-on.

The same thing happened with Obama’s trip to China: the press were terribly disappointed, because they wanted Obama to rail against the Chinese on human rights, monetary policy, the environment, and so on. Instead, Obama stayed calm, talked quietly and in private, and after he left China took several steps that will benefit the US.

I think that may be his style, and it can work well since he doesn’t leave openings for fighting.

UPDATE: Another point: With Obama staying out of the fight, who do the people and the press focus on? Congress: a bunch of familiar names and faces less easily demonized because they’ve been around longer. And the fight is familiar: the GOP shouting “No” and lying like a rug about the bill, the Democrats fighting among themselves but still sticking together (thanks in large part to Harry Reid, a white conservative-ish Mormon. Nothing to see here, folks, so the Congress goes about its regular business. New legislation, but comfortingly familiar process (from the point of those who might have been aroused to fight if Obama had gotten in the middle of it, particularly with the GOP noise machine making the most of it).

The new Omega 48 boar brush is breaking in nicely—still have to go back to the soap (in this case, Himalaya with shea butter by The Soap Opera) for the third pass, but coming along. The Edwin Jagger lined Chatsworth provided a smooth and trouble-free shave with its Swedish Gillette blade of several uses. Altogether, a fine shave, finished to perfection with TOBS Bay Rum.

Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress:

In today’s Washington Post, Binyam Applebaum and David Cho took a long look at the Federal Reserve’s complete failure to take note of the subprime housing bubble. “The Fed’s failure to foresee the crisis or to require adequate safeguards happened in part because it did not understand the risks that banks were taking,” they wrote. “[R]ather than looking for warning signs, the Fed had joined — and at times defined — the mainstream consensus among policymakers that financial innovations had made banking safer.”

Of course, much of the focus — and the blame — falls to current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Applebaum and Cho rightly remind readers of Bernanke’s 2007 declaration that “we see no serious broad spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market.”

And it’s not like there was a shortage of warnings given directly to the Fed regarding the housing market’s problems. In one of many such instances, National City bank’s chief economist told the Fed in January 2005 that “an increasingly overvalued housing market posed a threat to the broader economy.” But “the message wasn’t well received” :

One board member expressed particular skepticism — Ben Bernanke. “Where do you think it will be the worst?” Bernanke asked, according to people who attended the meeting, one in a series of sessions the Fed holds with economists. “I would have to say California,” said the economist, Richard Dekaser. “They have been saying that about California since I bought my first house in 1979,” Bernanke replied.

As it turns out, nine of the top 10 subprime lenders were based in California, “including all of the top five — Countrywide Financial Corp., Ameriquest Mortgage Co., New Century Financial Corp., First Franklin Corp., and Long Beach Mortgage Co.”

This cuts right to the heart of whether the Fed should continue to retain its responsibilities over consumer protection. After all, there were plenty of people out there — both in and out of the government — who saw what was going on.

In 2001, then Treasury official and current FDIC Chair Sheila Bair tried, without success, to get subprime lenders to adopt a code of best practices and allow outside monitors to verify compliance. In 2002, Freddie Mac stopped purchasing some varieties of subprime loans, in an effort to discourage predatory lending.

In 2004, the Greenlining Institute (from California, incidentally) told the Fed that “unscrupulous” lending practices were spreading. Finally, in 2005, Federal Reserve Board governor Edward Gramlich tried to warned his colleagues “of the decline of lending standards and the dangers that this posed.”

All of which signals that the Fed is an institution biased toward the banks that it regulates and unwilling to take action against those banks, even when the financial safety of consumers is at stake. It was by no means the Fed alone that dropped this ball, but it certainly bears a good portion of the burden, which should be remembered as the Senate heads toward a vote regarding whether or not to confirm Bernanke for a second term.

Glenn Greenwald:

Following up on what I wrote yesterday about our missile attacks in Southern Yemen strengthening Al Qaeda, there is an unusually informative article in Time — written by Abigail Hauslohner and based on her interview with Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen of Princeton University — that provides substantial elaboration on this point.  Noting that the U.S.-aided attack "appears to have resulted in a number of civilian casualties," the Time article details Johnsen’s view that "last week’s attacks would ultimately prove counterproductive":

[R]egardless of who did what, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, and mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked a public outcry and added to anti-American sentiments across the country. "They missed that individual," says Johnsen of the targeted al-Qaeda chief. "And at the same time, they ended up killing a number of women and children in the strike on Abyan. So now you have something where there are all these pictures of dead infants and mangled children that are underlined with the caption ‘Made in the USA’ on all the jihadi forums. Something like this does much more to extend al-Qaeda."

Indeed through the backlash that followed, the attacks have started to look like more of a boon than a bust for Yemen’s al-Qaeda revival, as well as for other opponents of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. Iran — which Yemen accuses of backing the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in the north — headlined the attacks on its state-sponsored Press TV with: "Obama ordered deadly blitz on Yemen."

"The al-Qaeda threat in Yemen is real, but now after this operation, it will be greater," says Mohammed Quhtan, a member of Yemen’s opposition Islamist al-Islah party. "Al-Qaeda will be able to recruit a lot more young people, at least from the tribes that were hit. And it will have reasonable grounds to attract more people from Abyan governorate, and from the Yemeni population in general. . . . "If you’re going to carry out [an attack] like this, you have to have done a great deal of field work, where you’ve sort of undermined al-Qaeda through development and aid so that when something like this happens, al-Qaeda can’t easily replace the individuals that it has lost," says Johnsen. "But if you don’t take those steps then the pool of recruits just starts to multiply exponentially."

So with this missile strike, we find yet again the most pervasive and destructive myth of American "counter-terrorism" efforts:  that there’s this finite worldwide club called "The Terrorists" (also known as "al Qaeda"), and our solemn mission is to hunt down its members and kill them all, and once we do, there will be no more "Terrorists" and we will have won.  Even at the peak of America’s warmongering hysteria in mid-2003, even Donald Rumsfeld knew enough to worry that more terrorists were being recruited and created than we were killing.  The Pentagon’s 2004 independent Task Force emphatically concluded that our acts of violence in the Muslim world were fueling — not undermining — Islamic radicalism.  Mountains of other evidence demonstrate the same conclusion.

What’s particularly confounding about our continuing on this path is that Obama is well aware of this causal relationship.  He’s repeatedly acknowledged it, and taken numerous steps — from outreach efforts to the Muslim world to changing the tone of our foreign policy to trying to close Guantanamo — that are all grounded in his accurate belief that decreasing anti-American sentiment is a prerequisite for improving American national security and combating Islamic extremism.  Yet as …

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Chait in The New Republic:

Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads that periodically sweep through Washington, the political class became obsessed with the notion that conservatives had unambiguously won what everybody was calling “the war of ideas.”

The notion was everywhere. The right gloated. (“Conservative thought,” boasted right-wing foundation maven James Piereson, “has seized the initiative in the world of ideas.”) Republicans scolded the opposition. (President Bush chastised Democrats in Congress: “[I]f they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.”) And Democrats internalized the accusation. (“It makes me realize,” observed labor leader Andrew Stern in 2005, “how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we’re defending sixty-year-old ideas.”)

We don’t need the benefit of hindsight to grasp how silly it was to claim that the Bush-era Republican Party had risen to power on the crest of policy ideas whose time had come, or that the Democratic Party lacked an agenda of its own. The taunts about Democrats’ lacking ideas was less a serious analysis than an attempt to bully the party into cooperating with Bush’s plan to gradually privatize Social Security. (Click here to read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women’s suffrage and child labor laws.)

In reality, both parties have plenty of ideas that they would like to implement if given the political power to do so. Republicans’ policy ideas primarily involve cutting marginal tax rates and regulations. The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.

In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality–not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.

Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to objectively large problems facing the country. The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform. The issues themselves offer a stark contrast with Bush’s 2005 crusade to reshape Social Security. While sold as a response to the program’s long-term deficit, the privatization campaign was actually motivated by ideological opposition to Social Security’s redistributive role. (Bush refused Democratic offers to negotiate a fix to the program’s solvency without altering its social-insurance character.) By contrast, it is impossible to dismiss the problems Obama has chosen to address. In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.

Begin with the economic crisis. The root cause of the collapse, as we all know by now, is that financial firms have grown so large and interconnected that the risks they incur can bring down the rest of the economy, forcing the government to intervene. After some initial support, the Republican response has been to denounce the financial bailout, without making any case that failing to save the financial system would have prevented a far deeper disaster…

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Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com wants to kill the Senate Bill—and she has her reasons, which are deftly refuted by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

I’ve gotten a lot of requests to respond to Jane Hamsher’s list of 10 reasons to kill the Senate bill. At this point, I’m not sure there’s much in the way of productive dialogue to be had here. Some of the list is purposefully misleading and is clearly aimed more at helping activists kill the bill than actually informing anyone about what is in the bill. Some of it points out things that really should be changed in the bill but aren’t central to the legislation itself, and are simply being leveraged to help activists kill the bill. But maybe there’s some utility to putting the document in context.

1) Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations — whether you want to or not.

"You," huh? For the 85 percent of the country already covered by health-care insurance, it doesn’t force "you" to do anything at all. People on Medicare are not going to be paying money to private insurance. People with employer-based care will not see their situation change.

For the nearly 50 million Americans caught in the ranks of the uninsured, here’s the deal: The bill expands Medicaid, a public program, to cover about 20 million of, uh, "you." Private insurance gets nothing. If you make more than 133 percent of the poverty line, but less than 400 percent, there’s a huge system of new subsidies to help you afford private coverage. There are also new regulations on insurers forcing them to spend between 80 percent and 85 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, barring them from rejecting you or charging you higher premiums due to preexisting conditions, ensuring they can’t place any annual caps on insurance benefits, and more.

But here’s the catch: So long as insurance won’t cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, you have to buy into the system. You can’t wait until you get sick or get hurt and and then buy insurance, shifting the costs onto everyone else. The cost of having a universal, or near-universal, system is that people have to participate. The promise is that, for the first time, participation will be possible.

2) If you refuse to buy the insurance, you’ll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.

Again, who’s "you?" If you don’t have employer-based coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, or anything else, and premiums won’t cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, and you refuse to purchase insurance, at that point, you will be assessed a penalty of up to 2 percent of your annual income. In return for that, you get guaranteed treatment at hospitals and an insurance system that allows you to purchase full coverage the moment you decide you actually need it. In the current system, if you don’t buy insurance, and then find you need it, you’ll likely never be able to buy insurance again. There’s a very good case to be made, in fact, that paying the 2 percent penalty is the best deal in the bill.

3) Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can’t afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums…

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Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for pointing out this post by Juan Cole on his blog:

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade. If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless ‘Oligarchs’ in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established ‘think tanks’ like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of ‘our’ (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn’t about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as ‘analysts’ or ‘economists’ or ‘journalists’). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

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