Mutant Poodle

We can finally say goodbye to Norm Coleman - a man, who, but for a tragic plane crash in 2002, would be a footnote in Minnesota political history.

Instead, he kept his Senate seat warm for six years and lost, by a mere 312 votes, to a comedian I saw perform at Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop when I was in high school.  He won’t be missed.

While I suppose one could give him credit for conceding after a 5-0 shellacking by the Minnesota Supreme Court, One could also point out that his appeals have been a fools errand, and that no one with blood flow to the brain thought there were any legal issues upon which Coleman could prevail. Instead, Coleman and the GOP worked to block Franken as long as they could, denying Minnesotans the Senator they elected eight months ago.

Just because I am that kind of guy, I’ll leave Garrison Keillor the final words on the ex-Senator from Minnesota - words he penned just two days after Coleman defeated Walter Mondale, Paul Wellstone’s last-minute replacement, in 2002. Keillor, normally a gentle writer, was, in this case, not so much (subscription required):

Norm is a slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history, a hugger and baby-kisser, and he’s a genuine boomer candidate who reinvents himself at will. The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west, went to law school, changed his look, went to work in the attorney general’s office in Minnesota. Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side. There was no dazzling light on the road to Damascus, no soul-searching: Norm switched parties as you’d change sport coats.

Norm is glib. I once organized a dinner at the Minnesota Club to celebrate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday and Norm came, at the suggestion of his office, and spoke, at some length and with quite some fervor, about how much Fitzgerald means to all of us in St. Paul, and it was soon clear to anyone who has ever graded 9th grade book reports that the mayor had never read Fitzgerald. Nonetheless, he spoke at great length, with great feeling. Last month, when Bush came to sprinkle water on his campaign, Norm introduced him by saying, “God bless America is a prayer, and I believe that this man is God’s answer to that prayer.” Same guy….

Norm finessed Wellstone’s death beautifully. The Democrats stood up in raw grief and yelled and shook their fists and offended people. Norm played his violin. He sorrowed well in public, he was expertly nuanced. The mostly negative campaign he ran against Wellstone was forgotten immediately. He backpedaled in the one debate, cruised home a victor. It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don’t envy someone who’s sold his soul. He’s condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.

Kind or not, they’re over.

I am incredibly spoiled when it comes to my health care coverage.   I had it when I was in college, then transitioned to coverage at the TV station I worked at in Rhode Island, then through UCLA while I was in grad school, and then, for a period of 20 years, coverage through major corporations (or their COBRA plans) at which I worked.

In early 2008, COBRA for my last employer (NewsCorp, and they have great benefits) ran out, and I had to find coverage on my own.  As a frame of reference, my COBRA cost in February 2008 was just under $500/month for a plan with vision and dental and a $500 deductible.  Under this plan, I could see anyone.

I found a plan with the same deductible through AETNA.  The on-line quote for my age and health was just under $450 - a little less than my COBRA - but this was a plan without vision and with a higher deductible for out-of-network visits, so it seemed a fair price.

However, when I was approved, I was told that a benign pre-existing condition I have placed me in a higher risk category for future health complications.  I can say without hesitation that this was bullshit, a point I made rather more delicately in a letter to AETNA appealing the 25% surcharge on my premium - a surcharge which totaled $1,250 a year.

AETNA never replied.

Still, even with the surcharge, I had good insurance for what I knew was  a decent rate in the current market.

But not for long.

Six months in, I was told that the increasing costs associated with medical care necessitated a 17%  increase in my rate - another $1,100 a year.   Now I’m up to $7,600/year in premiums, plus, of course, the various deductibles that come out of my pocket.

You’d think that one increase a year would be enough.

Think again.

Come February of this year, and my 50th birthday, my rate went up again, by almost 30%.  Now I’m supposed to pay at a rate of $9,800 a year.  And then, to top it off, my renewal offer came with a rate, starting in July, of over $900/month.

Obviously, I am no longer on this plan, Instead, I have one that costs about the same cost as my original quote, but with a $2,500 deductible.  And I am, in many ways, lucky to have it.

And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with the American health care system.  My ability to have coverage is dependent on the profit motive of insurance company executives.

The United States has lots of very good doctors.  Yet our health care is controlled by  organizations in whose fiscal interest it is for their sicker clients to go away.

Here’s the question: what would we like the American Health care system incentivized to do?  Because on a long list of worthy incentives, bumping up the holiday bonuses of insurance executivs would seem to have zero positive impact on national health care.  And if you think I’m guilty of hyperbole, remember that Blue Cross praised employees who had cut people from their rolls.   In that very same story, insurance executives said they would not promise to end the practice of rescission, even in cases where there had been no fraud on the part of the insured.

And these are the guys who the GOP is lining up to protect.

I have three words in response: fuck them all.

If ever something was ripe for a government takeover, it’s health insurance.   If you want to make sure the health risks of a nation are shared, have a single payer plan.

Since Democrats are too cowardly to even put that plan out there to tip the scales in that direction, we are left with a battle over the so-called “government option,”  which would allow people to (I’m typing slowly, Republicans, so you can understand) choose to join the government’s insurance plan, or stay with the private plan they have.  The talking points the GOP has settled are (a) this is a government take-over of the health care system, and (b) it would put a government bureaucrat between me and my health care provider.

As I said yesterday, the  next ignorant GOPer who warns of “government bureaucrats” ruining health care have to deal with the AETNA bureaucrats who ruin mine.

Anyway, my anger about having to supplicate myself to a God-damned corporation for what should be a fundamental right is one thing.  My anger that this pathetically broken system has been perpetuated for decades by greed, indifference, and the liberal application of campaign cash is another.  But there is the further anger that people who signed a blank check for Iraq and were more than willing to sign a $1.8 trillion check to extend the Bush Tax cuts have all of a sudden decided that we can’t afford to do something that would actually help some people whose annual incomes fall in the five-to-low-six figure category.  Here’s a new rule: if you advocated for both the Iraq war and those calamitous tax cuts, you have to shut the fuck up right now.  Or, as I said in January, when Republicans were clutching their pearls about the stimulus package:

Republicans should not be able to say things like “fiscal responsibility” or “borrow and spend” in public without being greeted by gales of laughter. In Lost in America, after Julie Hagerty had gambled away their nest egg, Albert Brooks (her husband) forbade her ever speak the phrase “nest egg” again - nor the words “nest” or “egg” individually. What Republicans did [with their tax cuts] was worse than a gamble - it was a calculated move to prevent the kind of spending that is currently contemplated in the stimulus bill. It is only the disastrous consequences of ignoring the impending - and predicted - collapse of the world financial markets that put us in a place where the kind of deficits contemplated in order to jolt the economy are taking a backseat to the acknowledged need to do something to, at the very least, reverse the slide we’re in.

And as for you nervous Democrats who also, in many cases, voted for both the war and the tax cuts because you didn’t have the stones to say no to what were clearly a disastrous set of policies and you were afraid of  the mean GOP attack machine, you can STFU too.

We need to fix health care.  We needed to fix it 8 years ago, but we let an empty-headed fraud steal our recovering fiscal health and give it to the wealthiest in our country.

Don’t tell me there’s no money.  Perhaps the Pentagon could go on a diet, and maybe agribusiness subsidies could go away, and maybe people who have good plans through work will have to pay a tax on them.  If I go back into that world, I’m willing to bear that cost.

So: Obama - don’t waste your energy on the GOP - they’re hopeless. Try to keep a few wobbly Dems in line.  GOP - don’t insult my intelligence by warning about government take-overs and evil government bureaucrats.   Democrats - don’t worry that the Republicans will be mean to you.  Thy will.  Take it as a badge of pride.

Everyone else?   Get in your Senators’ and Congress-critter’s face.  The meek may inherit the earth, but we should keep them far, far away from health care reform.

Well, it’s been a while.  Part of my recent absence I can blame on a crazy schedule - but that was just the start of it.  I’ve also gotten a little addicted to twitter (more on that later), but mostly, I didn’t really have anything to say.

I wasn’t sure why, but then Steve Benen noted that a Daily Show takedown of the GOP’s silliness on Guantanamo was very similar to a segment on the same subject in January:

The problem isn’t that the show is repetitious; the problem is the ridiculous debate is stuck in neutral, and the discourse is just spinning its wheels. Jon Stewart’s commentary was just as applicable now as it was four months ago because the debate hasn’t made any progress.

Indeed, we keep having the same arguments. The right will ask, “Is waterboarding really torture?” The rest of us will calmly explain the situation, point to the law, the science, and the history, and explain why it’s torture. The right will respond, “OK, but is waterboarding really torture?” Months go by, and conservatives keep asking the same question, learning the answer, and then asking the same question again. Lather, rinse, repeat….

Policy debates aren’t supposed to work this way. One side makes a dubious claim, and their rivals respond. If the claim is debunked, the first side moves onto new claims. The right refuses to play by these rules — they make bogus arguments, they fail, and then they repeat the exact same arguments again. It’s like the entire conservative movement is suffering from a short-term memory problem. That, or they assume Americans are idiots, and repeating lies improves the likelihood we’ll believe them.

Yup - if there’s a metaphor for today’s GOP, it’s a 1980 Ford Pinto stuck in the mud after a deluge.  The car is an old idea, it doesn’t run very well, and if you whack it too hard, it blows up.  But the Republicans keep hawking the ‘80 Pinto as the answer to today’s problems.

So that was one source of blogging ennui. And then there’s twitter.

I know: it’s a fad, it’s annoying, it’s a giant timesuck.  In fact, it may be all of those things (certainly the third).  But twitter is like a giant cocktail party where you can be in several conversations at once and never worry about whether you have bean dip on your shirt.  The good stuff jumps out at you, and the, um, other stuff fades quickly in the mirror.  There are lots of cool folks in twitterworld, and getting to (sort of) know them has been fun.

And then this week, Sonia Sotomayor hit the news.

Now, one can say a lot of things about Sonia Sotomayor. One might even have principled disagreements with some of her Judicial opinions.  But the hard right just took a batshit crazy pill and went off.  Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh called her a racist (Limbaugh added Obama to the “racist” category, too).  Tom Tancredo called her membership in La Raza troubling, because it is, as we all know, the Latino KKK (but with guacamole!).  Mitt Romney, who is not actually a Senator, threatened to filibuster her.  Pat Buchanan called Sotomayor an affirmative action hire.  NRO online’s Mark Krikorian complained about people in the media who had the audacity to pronounce Sotomayor’s name the way she and her family pronounce it.  Glenn Beck referred to Sotomayor as “Hispanic chick lady.” And G. Gordon Liddy crawled out from under a rock to hope that key court conferences did not happen when Sotomayor was “menstruating or something.”  I’m not sure if it’s the “menstruating” or the “or something” that’s more disturbing in that thought.

Now, as a partisan Democrat, it’s OK with me if the right wants to self-destruct.  But I have said before, and I am serious, that it’s really not good for this country to not have a sane opposition party with robust intellectual principles.   And say what you will about the GOP, but screaming about socialism and the inability of U.S. prisons to contain accused terrorists with their multiple superpowers isn’t exactly tightly moored to a coherent political philosophy.

Right now, Barack Obama’s opposition is the Blue Dog Democrats and a bunch of people who have lost touch with reality.  Worse, when anyone in the GOP steps toward sanity, they are pulled back over the edge by their far right colleagues (or media overlord Rush).

The media wasn’t much better, with Politico’s Mike Allen referring to Sotomayor as a “single mother”, the New York Times clutching its pearls about Sotomayor’s temperament, and the AP discovering, to their dismay, that while it may be true that Sotomayor’s background was humble and all that, they were shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - to discover that,as a Circuit Court Judge, Sotomayor makes a good income and is part of the power elite. Because we all know that Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito were humble judges (having taken vows of poverty) shunning the limelight when THEY were nominated.

So let’s review.  We have a woman who was given an opportunity she might not have gotten, say, 20 years earlier, and she made the most of it.  She has traveled further in her life’s journey than most of the members of the Supreme Court whom she will surely be joining in a few months.  She is, by all accounts, a middle of the road judge and not an “activist” one, by which I mean she would be unlikely to vote to stop a state from trying to find out who actually got more votes in a presidential election.  She has more judicial experience at this point in her career than any of the 8 justices with whom she will serve had when they were nominated.

Clearly, Pat Buchanan is right.

It seems to me that being qualified for the Supreme Court is a binary question - you either are or you’re not.  And maybe, in this country, there are a hundred individuals - maybe more, maybe less - who can get over that bar.

Sonia Sotomayor is clearly one of them.

The Republican party can dance around it, but there it is.  They don’t like how they think she’ll rule when she’s a Justice, which is fine.  I didn’t think I’d like Scalia, Roberts, Alito, or Thomas when they were nominated, and they have not disappointed.

But there’s a difference between disagreeing with someone and thinking them not qualified.  It’s a difference that some conservative legal scholars seem to get, and the GOP doesn’t.  Worse for them, it seems they have not thought this out.  They’re going to lose, so what will they gain from this exercise?  They’re going to look silly, because most of their attacks have been silly, and in the process they will - what is it?  - alienate the fastest-growing ethnic constituency in American politics.

Peter Sagal - yes, of Wait Wait Don’t Tell ME fame - had a good post on this earlier this week.  Called “A Hot Furnace Burns any Fuel”, it was a riff on the reflexive right wing noise machine:

Watching the conservative punditocracy go after Judge Sotomayor is a lesson in how they’ll take anyone and try to make, as my grandmother used to say, a Federal case out of it. I am reminded of a scene in a play a friend of mine wrote years ago, in which a salesman, as an exercise, tries to sell.. a seashell. In trying to paint this hard working, moderate, hell, judicious judge as some kind of combination of Andrea Dworkin and Rita Moreno, these guys are trying to sell a seashell.

And he smacks down the affirmative action canard as well:

I also attended one of those Elite Institutions, and it is true that I probably had a harder time getting admitted as an upper-middle class Jewish kid from the burbs, than if I had been (say) poor and Latino from the Bronx, because the elite institutions have lots of me and not a lot of them, and want to spread the wealth. But of course it is also true that I had every advantage, and they had none, so maybe we should spot those guys a couple of points on their SATs.

To which I’d add that it’s not just about spreading the wealth, but that people with vastly different experiences will make an educational institution richer.  Continuing:

And I knew some of them, and did projects some of them, and I saw a bit of that brusque behavior that people are now attributing to Sotomayor.  “Ooh, she’s not nice.” If she’s anything like the people I met at Harvard in the ’80s, then what she is, is what we used to call a grind, somebody who got everything she has by working extremely hard, and was going to do the same today and the next day ad infinitum, and had very, very little patience for those of us — and I stress “us” — who walked around the Yahd as if being there was something we were owed.

Is she brusque? Is she dismissive? I have no idea, but I would believe it.  She must look upon the aristocratic lawyers who stroll into her court, white and rich and Groton and Yale and summering on the Vineyard, the way farmers do at the people who think that food is something produced magically by waiters.

To which I’d say I actually doubt she’s dismissive - I’ve seen no indication of that in what I’ve read - but Sagal has, in a sentence, described how we should look at the rump of today’s GOP: “…the way farmers do at the people who think that food is something produced magically by waiters.”

You know, if I was in charge of a political party that…

• Had been beaten bloody in the last two national elections
• Was incapable of any policy positions other than “not what those other guys want to do”
• Has, as one of its most visible spokesman, the deeply reviled former Vice-President of the United States, who is on a campaign with his daughter to put a GOP face on torture, and
• Is at the lowest level of party affiliation in its history

…I’d probably put calling the other major political party names at the top of my to-do list as well.

[NoNo the Goposaurus c/o Daily Kos]

I can’t get too excited about Arlen Specter, in a highly principled stand desperate bid for reelection, becoming a Democrat.  Time and again over the past eight years, when it came time for a talk vs. walk evaluation of his principles, Specter’s jaw muscles got lots more exercise than his legs.  Need examples?  How about warrantless wiretapping & Telco Amnesty,  EFCA, his “principled” - but then dropped - concerns about Eric Holder, and his shameful treatment of Anita Hill?

So the Republican Party’s loss is the Democrat’s loss, too.  In his first big votes as a “Democrat”, Specter voted against the Obama budget and in lockstep with the American Banking Association against mortgage cramdown.  And then he went on Meet the Press and said, “I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that.”

Well gee, Arlen, welcome to the party.  You sure you don’t want to stick with the backstabbing folks who drummed you out of the GOP?  They seem to be your type.  Plus, it seems you’re lying.

Republicans - shocked by what was, in fact, a well-kept secret - were all over the place in their reactions.  There was the “he was never a republican anyway, and we’re better off without him” thread (Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh), there was the “Specter’s switch is dangerous for America” spin from Mitch McConnell (no, really - check it out), there was sanity from Olympia Snowe (which caused many in the GOP rump to want her to bolt the party, too), and then there was this gem from Bill Kristol:

On May 24, 2001, I wrote an op-ed for The Post in the wake of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords’s party switch. I argued that the switch, which cost Republicans control of the Senate, could well turn out to be good for President Bush.

Not entirely for the reasons I speculated on in the op-ed, I turned out to be right. Bush was still able to get enough cooperation to govern over the next year and a half, and he was also able to run successfully against the Democratic Senate in the fall of 2002. The GOP regained control that November.

Similarly and contrarianly, I wonder if today’s Arlen Specter party switch, this time to the president’s party, won’t end up being bad for President Obama and the Democrats.

Hmmm.  Did anything happen - anything at all - that might have changed the political dynamic in this country between, say, May of 2001 and November of 2002? Oh, hell - I’ll make it easy - between, say, September 10, 2001, and September 12, 2001? Anybody?

That’s right - terrorists flew planes into each f the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon,and were prevented from hitting a fourth target (Congress?  The White House?) by the bravery of the passengers on United Flight 93.

In the aftermath of 9/11,the country united around a still relatively green President, the world united around a wounded country, and the Republican Party, misled by the support their President received in its aftermath, was blinded to the problems which today leave them gasping for support - only one in five Americans identifying as Republicans, and with barely a presence in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest.

Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, frames inciting incidents in drama this way: either the event is the worst thing that could have happened to you but ends up being the best, or it’s the best thing that could have happened to you but winds up being the worst.  9/11, I think, was the second type.

Here’s why.  First, George Bush was, in mid-2001, riding along with just middling popularity.  There were hard feelings about the election that he had just won stolen, and notwithstanding his popular vote deficit, he was governing as if he’d won a landslide.  And here’s the thing, and I don’t think it’s just me and my deep-seated liberal bias: he wasn’t wearing well.  George Bush was like the guy at the party with the great stories, but when you spend more time with him, it turns out that’s all he’s got, and that when he’s got to react to anything contemporaneous, he’s not such good company after all.  (As the Enron and related accounting firm scandals unfolded, quite often Bush’s remarks intended to steady the markets had the exact opposite effect.  And don’t forget his deer in the headlights reaction upon hearing that a plane had hit the second tower in New York.)

9/11 rescued Bush and the Republicans.  It allowed them to coalesce around national security and paper over their shortcomings in domestic and foreign policy (indeed, even their failure to worry about a 9/11-type attack ahead of time!); it dropped to the bottom of the list so-called “soccer mom” issues (soccer moms became, for a time, all about security); it allowed the Republican party to make your willingness to strip worker protections out of the bill establishing the Department of Homeland Security a test of one’s patriotism; and it allowed Bush to start a war which sucked all the oxygen out of the political room for years to come.  And still, George Bush, a wartime President, came within a few hundred thousand votes of losing reelection to one of the least sympathetic candidates for President to ever run on the Democratic ticket.

If 9/11 doesn’t happen, the abberant spike in Bush’s popularity in the graph above doesn’t happen; the GOP’s best weapon against Democrats - politicizing national security - is far less potent; and whether or not the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2002, I’d argue George Bush would have had an excellent chance of losing his 2004 reelection bid.  (It’s unknowable, of course, but perhaps the Democrats, freed from their national Security paranoia, would have nominated someone other than John Kerry in 2004.)  In any event, my thesis is that Bush loses in 2004 absent 9/11, while the GOP holds on to at least one of the chambers of Congress.

Which would have given the GOP a four year head start - and some governing power in the interim - to try and reconnect with an electoral dynamic that is still walking away from them rather briskly.  Not to mention they wouldn’t have had to defend George Bush’s record in 2008.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the Club for Growth wouldn’t have gone after Lincoln Chafee in 2006, but it does mean his party identification wouldn’t have been as toxic in 2006 as it turned out to be.  And it’s quite possible that the GOP would have hurtled down their current path towards merely regional relevance anyway - the notion of enforced ideological purity has always been slightly more in their character than it has with Democrats. The Republicans have coalesced around the base that’s left, and while having a Manichean worldview does simplify one’s arguments, it also makes it easy to justify the ideological purge that seems to be happening today.

9/11 was fools gold.  It made the Republican party feel rich and invincible.  They acted like it, and their act wore thin.  They supported their President when they knew better; more often, they didn’t seem to know better, but the result was the same.

The GOP pain is this: to recover, they have to disappoint their most fervent supporters.  Many friends I have who were Republicans when George Bush took office - most of whom I would have called Rockefeller Republicans - are Republicans no more, and there is no one in the party today that they have any comfort with as a leader.  If the Republicans move toward the center to get them back, the religious right may well bolt.   If they don’t, the Republicans will continue to shrink, and their best hope is a catastrophic failure by Barack Obama.

Not really a proactive plan.

I can’t say I feel badly for them - 6 years of having my patriotism questioned for disagreeing with the President will encourage schadenfreude - but I do believe that an intellectually robust opposition is a good thing.  So while the Republican party is recovering from this hangover brought on by 9/11’s seductive fog, maybe they could just come up with a new idea or two to throw into the arena.  I probably won’t agree with it, but I’d rather argue about something new than about whether Barack Obama is selling our country to al qaeda, or whether higher marginal tax rates or a public option for health care are the clearest harbinger of the coming socialist fascist American empire.

Some flu-like thing whacked me Monday and the brain cells are just reconnecting today.  So apologies for the absence.  (It’s not like anything happened this week, right?)

Speaking of one of those things, the notion that letting homeowners have the same option of bankruptcy protection on their real estate obligations as, you know, CORPORATIONS, would be the end of the world as we know it seems to me to be head-smackingly incorrect.

More later when other sentences form.