Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Quick hits/stupid questions/vague phumphering

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  • Every once in a while, I Twitter — particularly if my thought is not profound enough to expand upon. Recent tweet:

    “Aren't the deathers actually complaining that health care reform won't be *sufficiently bleeding-heart liberal*?”

    Hey … you want your socialism or not, bub?

  • I'm pretty sure that it was wrong to take Senatorial appointment away from Romney, and right to give it to Patrick. Maybe that's just too convenient, though. The keys, to my mind, are: 1. Two senators per state — always; and 2. New election as soon as possible.
  • George Lakoff says don't get hung up on wonk-speak with health care. I agree: Principles are like a magnet for policies. It's more important that we set down principles of goodness/justice rather than tie ourselves to particular policy planks. The health care debate among the Dems has gotten a little too Mac vs. PC, to my mind.
  • I still think Obama's doing a great job — yes, even in health care. I don't understand the emphasis on him — as if he can wave a magic wand and make the Senate do exactly what he wants. The ball's in their Court, after all — they write the laws.
  • What's more important than health care? Oh, I don't know, maybe Catastrophic Global Climate Change. And the grassroots are really not working that one at all, while the world hurtles towards disaster.

    “Sooner or later we are going to have to come to grips with the fact that the climate crisis is threatening the future of our civilization, and just because those words sound shrill is no excuse for not saying them.’’ — Al Gore

    Apparently the military has also gone shrill on this matter:

    Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements, or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon, and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

    What we need right now is the persistent, committed hysteria of the sane.

  • What would Bono do?
  • One more: Jon Stewart vs. Betsy McCaughey, the woman whose “death panels” fantasies hit the big time.
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  1. To me, the big question for Democrats in Congress, most of who were there in 2001, is:

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    p>Why did you roll over and die for Bush’s tax cut in 2001, when many of us barely recognized his legitimacy as president, but you won’t give your own president his top legislative priority?

  2. there might not be a Mexico, because the Mayans were on the fast track to being mega-powerful before a drought pwned them.  

  3. I don’t understand the emphasis on him — as if he can wave a magic wand and make the Senate do exactly what he wants.

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    p>Probably we were spoiled by the W years- the Golden Age of Presidential wish fulfillment. Since Obama has kept all those other Bush prerogatives – rendition, state secrets, rewarding bankers – why not the whole Prez Perks package?

      • fumfer:

        verb to fumfer A Yiddish word meaning to “mumble”, most often used to mean to be evasive; can also mean to putter aimlessly or to waste time.

          1. to stammer; to mutter nervously or confusedly;

        Some common spellings: ‘phumpher’ and ‘fumpher’, to a lesser extent ‘pfumpher’ and ‘pfumpfer’, and very rarely, ‘pfumfer’. Never ‘phumfer’. The most common is ‘phumpher’, followed closely by ‘fumfer’.

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        p>What happens if you phumfer, I wonder?

    • Under the current law, Kennedy can announce that he will leave office on a date certain 4-5 months in the future.  That creates a “vacancy” under the statute, whereupon the special election can go ahead, and there would be a gap of only a few days.

  7. It’s like a nice coalition is building for health care being a right.  But the deathers don’t necessarily think we should pay for it, they just don’t want it withheld.

  8. Greenwald points out that the White House knows how to play hardball when it comes to rebellious lefty legislators. He concludes that Obama could do much more to move the senate, but he isn’t because the main goal of his team, led by Rahm, is to win the war on which party secures insurance industry contributions going forward. There’s no other explanation, he suggests, for why they are so willing to make unforced concessions. I don’t know if this is too strong but GG is generally persuasive.  

    • that in fact, the entire terms of the debate have been set by the insurance industry, which has asked to be cut into the eventual deal. But you know, that’s the game that all the Democratic candidates going back to 2007 decided to play. None of them proposed single-payer, none proposed abolishing the insurance industry.

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      p>But it’s worth it to remember that the insurance industry has already agreed to guaranteed issue — I’m not sure what their position on community rating is, though I think it’s not an absolute “no”. (These things go together like ramalamalama kadinga-dadingadong.)

      <

      p>So … I don’t know if Rahm is working the lefties harder than the Blue Dogs. Saying that it’s “stupid” to attack Blue Dogs might just mean that it would have been smarter to attack conservative Republicans — thereby moving the Overton window, too.

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      p>I don’t know … In this case, I find Greenwald’s, and much of the lefty blogosphere’s writings to be a bit too pat, and frankly a bit spiteful, i.e. no deal can be any good if it’s also good for PhRMA and insurers — even if it means they change the way they do business.

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      p>I don’t know … I bemoan the fact that Congress has been bought. But here we are, and here’s the issue, and how do you get people covered — now?

      • It is hard not to conclude that the industry has been given a veto over the public option, if you believe the White House could get 60 votes in the senate if it wanted to.

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        p>Get people covered right now with mandates that fill up the rolls of the private insurers, by all means. I believe Obama when he says the road to universal coverage has to go through the existing system of employment-based coverage with private insurers.

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        p>But that’s the beauty of the public option. You can take advantage of the immediacy of private coverage, while giving the public (including strapped employers) a way of moving to single-payer if and when it wants to, a safety valve if the private industry continues to prove itself structurally incapable of good coverage and cost-control.

        <

        p>BTW, the public option has been at the core of the debate for quite a while. Check out Jim Roosevelt’s argument against it back in April, and Dan Froomkin’s summary of the debate this week.  

      • … on Obama’s political strategy here.

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        p>

        I think the answer to Mr. Kuttner’s conundrum can be found in an article, ironically enough, by one Mark Schmitt, who happens to be executive editor of, you guessed it, The American Prospect. Way back in December 2007, when supporters of both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were pummeling Obama on what they deemed was the wishy-washiness of his bipartisan appeal in the face of so nasty an opponent, Schmitt published an influential (among liberals) argument, “The ‘Theory of Change‘ Primary.” In it, Schmitt argued that liberals were “too literal in believing that ‘hope’ and bipartisanship are things that Obama naĂ¯vely believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”

        Obama invited me to dinner shortly after he became a senator, and I got exactly the same impression. This man is, like FDR, a genuine liberal, but also a serious politician. He is not interested in moral victories or noble defeats. He wants to win. What he’s figured out, however, is that-particularly after two full decades of Bush/Clinton/Bush wars-the American people feel more comfortable with a politician who appears to reach out to the other side, who gives them a chance to play ball. This works both as an electoral strategy and a governing strategy. He gave in a little on the stimulus, but just enough to keep the ball rolling. He could always come back for more, later if necessary.

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        p>He goes on to explain some problems with it.

  9. The typical bag of conservative proposals on healthcare reform includes:

    • Medical savings accounts
    • Tort reform
    • Some kind of deregulation to foster competition
    • Removing incentives for “over” insurance
    • Taxing health insurance benefits like income

    Traditionally, conservatives go further, pushing to eliminate Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

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    p>In this light, the concern about “death panels” seems striking. Someone near the end of life is likely to face very expensive treatment options with a depleted medical savings account.

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    p>What happens next for such people? Discount morphine?

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