No $$$ for Democrats

I just wrote President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and my congressman to express the sentiments I posted here.

You don't quit? Prove it! Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

Democrats don't get it

In the last few days I've received fundraising requests from Nancy Pelosi and from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, both using President Obama's "I don't quit" line from the State of the Union as a hook.

I'm sorry, but don't you get it? I'm not sending you any money until I have some evidence that you don't quit.

Which means: Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

That's the response I just sent the DCCC.

On the beach yesterday

Yesterday I took a walk on Cannon Beach. I took a photo on my cell phone, wishing I had a better camera

And I looked to the heavens and asked some questions. And lo and behold I got an answer from a stranger later that evening.

Obama's meeting with the GOP today

Obama met with the GOP caucus today:

President Obama and the Congressional Republicans who have opposed him engaged in a lively and robust public debate this afternoon over health care, the economy and who was more to blame for the toxic atmosphere clouding the nation’s politics.

Mr. Obama visited the House Republican retreat here in an attempt to break through the partisan logjam that has helped stall his legislative agenda. What ensued was a remarkable encounter in which a president spoke to an essentially hostile crowd for an hour and half, sparring with the leadership of the opposition party in a way that is rarely seen in carefully scripted American politics.

I watched the whole thing and can highly recommend taking the time to do so, especially the question and answer portion. (Full transcript here.)

More from CBS; The Daily Dish compiled some reactions here.

Obama's opening statement:

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Here is the Q&A portion of the meeting, it's well worth watching.

Segment 1 (tax cuts and the 2008 stimulus bill)

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Segment 2 (more on tax cuts and questions about Obama's proposed discretionary spending freeze, a Constitutional line item veto, earmarks, and energy policy)

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Segment 3 (more on energy policy and earmarks, healthcare reform including Obama's failure to broadcast all of the healthcare reform bill negotiations on C-SPAN, and Republican pushback on being the "party of no")

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Segment 4 (healthcare reform including Obama's calling out the GOP for essentially accusing Dems of a "Bolshevik plot" (at the 4:40 mark))

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Segment 5 (more on healthcare reform, Obama's statements that he's read proposed GOP legislation and that legislative compromise is part of democracy, and a question from an Illinois lawmaker about Speaker Pelosi's willingness to work with Republicans on issues like free trade legislation (answered in segment 6))

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Segment 6 (Obama admits that he failed to bring the Democratic and Republican leadership together enough and answers a question about free trade; he pushes back hard on a question about the budget deficit to illustrate how false assertions prevent Democrats and Republicans from achieving anything together and sets the record straight on the spending history of the past ten years (continued in segment 7))

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Segment 7 (Obama finishes up his answer to a budget deficit question and explains why he disagrees with some Republican proposals for dealing with America's long-term deficit problems)

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Lost Generation

An interesting, palindrome-like video (from the AARP!):

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State of the Union

I'll be in class tonight and will miss the State of the Union address... guess it'll be a YouTube night for me. Like many pundits, Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein see tonight as a true test of President Obama's ability to lead.

Let's hope he can.

From Sullivan:

The test of leadership is sometimes staying a course even when all the polls and pols have turned against it on a dime. There are times when a president should preside; but there are also times when he must lead.

I have one simple test: if the health bill dies from neglect and irresolution, Obama is no leader.

He is a follower. He cannot vote present on this one. He has majorities in both Houses and a landslide victory and he is unable to deliver on a core priority in his first year. That's a definition of a failed presidency and it is why the GOP - with nothing to offer the country - decided to make it his Waterloo. They knew and know how gutting this bill and killing reform and suffocating any serious change in this country is their way to a nihilist victory. And such a victory would not be a vindication of Republican policy right now. It would be a perfectly reasonable response to a Democratic party palpably incapable of governing and a president clearly unable to deliver.

If he cannot do this, he does not have the fortitude to be a successful president. And his weakness on this will be rightly interpreted as weakness everywhere else. That applies to foreign policy as well, with Netanyahu and Khamenei and Chavez and Sarkozy all watching to see what this guy is made of.

And from Klein:

Tonight's speech is the most important of his young presidency, and it will be the most revealing of his career. Does he stand and fight for a health-care bill he believes to be a historic and necessary step forward? Or does he back away from it, letting some gestures toward his commitment to the issue stand in for the determined leadership -- and the political gamble -- that would represent real commitment to the issue?

During the campaign, Obama famously told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, "just give me the ball." Today, Obama is the president of the United States. He's got a lot of people screaming at him and cheering for him, and almost as many shouting advice. But he's the guy with the ball. The question is what he does with it.

Quote for the day

“As a nation built on the principle of equality, we should recognize and welcome change that will build a stronger more cohesive military. It is time to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” and allow our military leaders to create policy that holds our service members to a single standard of conduct and discipline."

-- former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Shalikashvili

Shalikashvili released this statement today; more here.

Quote for the day

"Populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power."

-- David Brooks

Democrats throw in the towel; I respond with disgust

It appears that Democratic leaders are throwing in the towel on pushing for healthcare reform legislation anytime soon:

With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying that they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. “We’re not on health care now,” he said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” He added, “There is no rush,” and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House.

At the same time, two centrist Democratic senators who are up for re-election this year, Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana, said that they would resist efforts to muscle through a health care bill using a parliamentary tactic called budget reconciliation, which seemed to be the simplest way to advance the measure....

Some Democrats said that they did not expect any action on health care legislation until late February at earliest, perhaps after Congress returns from a weeklong recess. But the Democrats stand to lose momentum, and every day closer to the November election that the issue remains unresolved may reduce the chances of passing a far-reaching bill.

And because of my disgust, I'm throwing my own towel onto the pile: I'm not lifting a finger to support any of those Democratic legislators who had no courage to move on their agenda even with large Democratic margins in both houses of Congress.

In 2008 I contributed heavily to President Obama's campaign as well as less liberally to Congressional Democrats. I walked precincts and walked on doors. I voted in every election. I worked in order to get them elected to do what they said they'd do.

And since they can't hold up their end of the bargain, I'm choosing to consider myself free to sit on the sidelines as well. Maybe I'm late to the party, but I'm sick of politicians more interested in being re-elected than getting anything done. As Ezra Klein commented today:

Politicians have a tendency of talking about the consequences of elections as if they're very real and the consequences of policy as if they're very abstract, and as we're seeing with the stalling of the health-care bill in the aftermath of Martha Coakley's loss, they legislate that way, too. And then they wonder why voters don't trust them and their initiatives.

During this past year I've been moderate in my expectations of Obama and the Democrats. But if they are this ineffective in achieving a key plank in their party platform, even with advantages of 256-178 in the House and a 59-41 in the Senate, then I'm at a loss as to why putting in the effort to elect Democrats matters.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

Want the House to pass the Senate's healthcare reform bill?

Then make a call. Today.

The limitations of the "corporations as persons" argument

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has been defending last week's Supreme Court decision that will allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. He argues that none of the justices dispute the notion that corporations are "persons" and have First Amendment rights, and he asks several questions to make his point:

Do you believe the FBI has the right to enter and search the offices of the ACLU without probable cause or warrants, and seize whatever they want?

Do they have the right to do that to the offices of labor unions?

How about your local business on the corner which is incorporated?

The only thing stopping them from doing this is the Fourth Amendment. If you believe that corporations have no constitutional rights because they're not persons, what possible objections could you voice if Congress empowered the FBI to do these things?

Can they seize the property (the buildings and cars and bank accounts) of those entities without due process or just compensation? If you believe that corporations have no Constitutional rights, what possible constitutional objections could you have to such laws and actions?

Could Congress pass a law tomorrow providing that any corporation - including non-profit advocacy groups -- which criticize American wars shall be fined $100,000 for each criticism? What possible constitutional objection could you have to that?

The problem, of course, is that while it's perfectly reasonable for corporations and other entities to have all of the protections that he illustrates here, we still don't allow them to vote in elections, run for office, or be appointed to serve as, hmm, let's say, Supreme Court Justices. Just because corporations, labor unions, and other legally recognized entities have certain rights under the law doesn't mean that they should have all the same rights as living, breathing human beings. Is that really so unobvious, Glenn?

David Plouffe's strategy for Democrats

If you haven't read David Plouffe's open letter to Democrats, with a strategy for success in this year's mid-term elections, you can find it here.

Music and our experience of reality

Jonah Lehrer has a great post on his blog about a recent paper on how we experience music. He included a passage from his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist:

Before a pattern can be desired by the brain, it must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes our auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring. This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. Our auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5th movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with--but not submission to--our expectations of order. He dissected fifty measures of Beethoven's masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music's feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its "connotative" meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This "embodied meaning" arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. "For the human mind," Meyer writes, "such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty." And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven's established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, "is the whole raison d'etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic."

One of my favorite classes as an undergraduate was my freshman year Introduction to Music course. My professor said essentially the same thing: that a piece of music normally ends with a note that was introduced at the beginning, and until we hear that note, there's no sense of resolution. We have the feeling of being left hanging. The paper Lehrer mentions in his book and the current research he summarizes on his blog both support that notion. It rings true for me and creates a delicious image of my brain at work: listening, looking for the pattern in the music, anticipating what comes next...

I remember a night of dancing at Pleasuredome; my friend Phil B was spinning. A man told me I danced as if I knew what Phil was going to play before he played it, and having read Lehrer's post today, I realize that something similar was at work: I'd given myself up to the intuitive dancer in my brain who was anticipating where Phil was going. My joy came both from guessing right and from being surprised, the former bringing a sense of being at harmony with the world, the latter bringing forth a smile of happiness with the novel. I remember thinking many times on the dancefloor that dancing was the continual process of controlled falling down: of lifting the body and its parts and releasing them to the pull of gravity. Not quite surrendering to the music and the environment, but not maintaining full control either. During those years when dancing ws the most important thing in my life, it was not knowing exactly what came next which made the experience so sweet.

(For more on music and how we experience it, I suggest Oliver Sacks' "The Abyss." The article explores the case of a man unable to make new memories and who only feels an integrated sense of the past, present, and future while playing music.)

Computers + radiation therapy = a potentially deadly combination

Wow, I just read a frightening article in the New York Times about a rash of computer programming errors that have led many patients undergoing high-tech radiation therapy for cancer to be massively--sometimes fatally--overdosed.

One example:

Shortly after 11 a.m., as Ms. Kalach [a medical physicist at St. Vincent's hospital in New York City] was trying to save her work, the computer began seizing up, displaying an error message. The hospital would later say that similar system crashes “are not uncommon with the Varian software, and these issues have been communicated to Varian on numerous occasions.”

An error message asked Ms. Kalach if she wanted to save her changes before the program aborted. She answered yes. At 12:24 p.m., Dr. Berson approved the new plan.

Meanwhile, two therapists were prepping Mr. Jerome-Parks for his procedure, placing a molded mask over his face to immobilize his head.

Then the room was sealed, with only Mr. Jerome-Parks inside.

At 12:57 p.m. — six minutes after yet another computer crash — the first of several radioactive beams was turned on.

The next day, there was a second round of radiation.

A friend from church, Paul Bibbo, stopped by the hospital after the second treatment to see how things were going.

Mr. Bibbo did not like what he saw. Walking into a darkened hospital room, he recalled blurting out: “ ‘My goodness, look at him.’ His head and his whole neck were swollen.”

Anne Leonard, another friend, saw it, too, on a later visit. “I was shocked because his head was just so blown up,” Ms. Leonard said. “He was in the bed, and he was writhing from side to side and moaning.”

Concerned about the problem, the medical physicist checked the system's treatment program for the patient:

On the afternoon of March 16, several hours after Mr. Jerome-Parks received his third treatment under the modified plan, Ms. Kalach decided to see if he was being radiated correctly.

So at 6:29 p.m., she ran a test to verify that the treatment plan was carried out as prescribed. What she saw was horrifying: the multileaf collimator, which was supposed to focus the beam precisely on his tumor, was wide open.

A little more than a half-hour later, she tried again. Same result.

Finally, at 8:15 p.m., Ms. Kalach ran a third test. It was consistent with the first two. A frightful mistake had been made: the patient’s entire neck, from the base of his skull to his larynx, had been exposed.

Early the next afternoon, as Mr. Jerome-Parks and his wife were waiting with friends for his fourth modified treatment, Dr. Berson unexpectedly appeared in the hospital room. There was something he had to tell them. For privacy, he took Mr. Jerome-Parks and his wife to a lounge on the 16th floor, where he explained that there would be no more radiation.

Mr. Jerome-Parks had been seriously overdosed, they were told, and because of the mistake, his prognosis was dire.

Stunned and distraught, Ms. Jerome-Parks left the hospital and went to their church, a few blocks away. “She didn’t know where else to go,” recalled Ms. Leonard, their friend.

The next day, Ms. Jerome-Parks asked two other friends, Nancy Lorence and Linda Giuliano, a social worker, to sit in on a meeting with Dr. Berson and other hospital officials.

During the meeting, the medical team took responsibility for what happened but could only speculate about the patient’s fate. They knew the short-term effects of acute radiation toxicity: burned skin, nausea, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, loss of taste, swelling of the tongue, ear pain and hair loss. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess when the more serious life-threatening symptoms would emerge.

“They were really holding their breath because it was the brain stem and he could end up a paraplegic and on a respirator,” Ms. Giuliano said.

Ms. Lorence added: “I don’t really think they expected Scott to live more than two months or three months.”

In the end, he died two years later. While there were problems with the computer software designed by Varian to control the system, operators missed a variety of warning that should have alerted them to problems:

When the computer kept crashing, Ms. Kalach, the medical physicist, did not realize that her instructions for the collimator had not been saved, state records show. She proceeded as though the problem had been fixed.

“We were just stunned that a company could make technology that could administer that amount of radiation — that extreme amount of radiation — without some fail-safe mechanism,” said Ms. Weir-Bryan, Ms. Jerome-Parks’s friend from Toronto. “It’s always something we keep harkening back to: How could this happen? What accountability do these companies have to create something safe?”

Disturbingly:

Even with this special protection, the strongest in the country, many radiation accidents go unreported in New York City and around the state. After The Times began asking about radiation accidents, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reminded hospitals in July of their reporting obligation under the law. Studies of radiotherapy accidents, the city pointed out, “appear to be several orders of magnitude higher than what is being reported in New York City, indicating serious underreporting of these events.”

The Times collected summaries of radiation accidents that were reported to government regulators, along with some that were not. Those records show that inadequate staffing and training, failing to follow a good quality-assurance plan and software glitches have contributed to mistakes that affected patients of varying ages and ailments....

Fines or license revocations are rarely used to enforce safety rules. Over the previous eight years, despite hundreds of mistakes, the state issued just three fines against radiotherapy centers, the largest of which was $8,000.

Stephen M. Gavitt, who directs the state’s radiation division, said if mistakes did not involve violations of state law, fines were not proper. The state does require radiotherapy centers to identify the underlying causes of accidents and make appropriate changes to their quality-assurance programs. And state officials said New York had taken a leadership role in requiring that each facility undergo an external audit by a professional not connected to the institution.

Obama and the financial industry

While I've generally been happy with President Obama's strategy of surrounding himself with people known for their intelligence and competence rather than ideology, I have to say I'm sympathetic to those who don't want to see Ben Bernanke confirmed for a second term as the Federal Reserve chairman. As smart as this guy seems--and as effective he may have been at backing the car out of the ditch--he was, at the very least, holding the map when the car veered off the road in the first place. From all reports that I've read, Bernanke just didn't see financial meltdown coming.

And as Frank Rich describes in his latest column, I'm coming around to the view that Obama is too tightly wed to too many people who had a hand in creating the environment that led to the meltdown.

I think it's time to see some action on the position that candidate Obama staked out: namely, that it's silly to expect to keep the same old people around and get a different result. I never expected Obama to be a radical, and I actually admire his small "c" conservatism. But when people are part of the problem, you need a different point of view. Like Paul Volcker's, which Obama is belatedly tuning into.

For the record, I don't agree with Rich that Obama squandered political capital on healthcare reform, but I'm on the same page with him that the President should have been less deferential to Congress about what a bill should look like. The Baucus interlude over the summer felt like a waste at the time; it now, obviously, can be seen as disaster.

Song for a Friday night

"Gorecki" by Lamb.

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I always wanted to take up falconry... (bonus: smart dolphins and dogs)

New ultralight cameras now provide an eagle-eye view from the air.

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AND ON THE TOPIC OF THE WONDERS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, here's video of a pod of dolphin's that's learned to catch fish in a unique way:

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And a story about stray dogs that have learned to use the Moscow subway to get around!

Thanks to The Daily Dish for all of these links...

Obama tells Ohio that he's going to keep fighting

Sounds like President Obama amped up his rhetoric in Ohio today, vowing to keep fighting for healthcare reform and the other items on his agenda. I hope he does... and that he starts by corraling Democrats in the House and pushing for passage of the Senate healthcare reform bill. More here.

$$$ in perspective

$2,900,000,000,000 - the annual amount spent by the federal government
    $2,300,000,000 - Bank of America's annual marketing budget
        $8,531,000 - average amount spent by a senator running for election
        $1,372,000 - average amount spent by a congressman running for election

So if you were a company regulated by the government (or a federal contractor paid by the government), and you had a big pot of money to spend which was far bigger than the typical amount spent by someone running for election, don't you think it would be pretty easy to intimidate a candidate into voting your way? Or to essentially pay them to do so?

That is the new world we're living in after yesterday's Supreme Court decision. More from Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias here.

Song for my day

I posted Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" last May. But it's my birthday. And I'll post it again if I want to. :-)

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5 beats 4, but 41 is too many for 59

Our government is like some bizarre game of rock, scissors, paper. James Fallows makes this point as he takes notice of Democrats caving on healthcare reform after the loss of their supermajority yet a single one vote majority in the Supreme Court is enough to enact fundamental changes in election law:

Fifty-nine senators, representing ... some 63 percent of the American public, accompanied by a large House majority and a president recently elected with 70 million votes, cannot enact changes in the nation's health-care system that have been debated for decades. A 59-41 margin is not enough for a change of this magnitude.

Five Justices of the Supreme Court, outvoting their four colleagues, can work a fundamental change in election law that goes far beyond the issues presented by the parties to the case.... Courts always have the option of deciding cases narrowly or broadly. The breadth of this one, reaching far beyond the merits of the case so as to enact the majority Justices' views, is staggering even to a non-lawyer like me. A one-person margin is enough for a change of this magnitude.

Ezra Klein: Can Democrats govern?

Ezra Klein asks the question, and given the way Dianne Feinstein, Barney Frank, and a bunch of the rest of them are waving white flags and running for the hills, I find myself wondering, too...

If Democrats abandon health-care reform in the aftermath of Brown's victory, the lesson will be that they can't govern. No majority within the realm of reason will give them the votes to move their agenda swiftly and confidently. Even the prospect of the most significant legislative achievement in 40 years, an achievement that will save hundreds of thousands of lives, will not keep them from collapsing into chaos when they face adversity.

At that point, what's the pitch for voting for Democrats? That they agree with you? A plumber and I both agree that my toilet should work. But if he can't make it work, I'm not going to pay him any money or invite him into my home. Governance isn't just about ideology. It's also about competence and will. That's where Democrats are flagging.

Today's campaign finance decision from SCOTUS: dead wrong

The New York Times spells out clearly why the Supreme Court was overreaching today when it ruled that the free speech rights of corporations should allow them to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. From the editorial:

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

Silver rebuts Brooks' Iraq analogy

Nate Silver at 538 rebuts David Brooks' Iraq analogy which I re-posted yesterday. Basically, Silver's point is that in both the Iraq War and healthcare debates, one side was able to successfully rally public opinion with lies and distortions. Rather than simply give up, Democrats need to stay the course but make their case more clearly. And they shouldn't abandon their principles and their 2008 electoral mandate because the GOP has decided to put lies about "death panels" ahead of the public good.

Obama on healthcare reform, after the Brown election

In a Wednesday interview with George Stephanopoulos, President Obama explains why healthcare reform is necessary and why a comprehensive solution is necessary in order to do any good (in bold, my emphasis):

The reason I tackled healthcare wasn't because this was my personal hobbyhorse. The reason I tackled it was during the course of the campaign, I traveled all across this country and I kept on hearing heart-breaking stories about families who were bankrupt because they got sick. If they had health insurance, suddenly insurance companies were doing things that were just plain wrong, and were leaving folks in an extremely vulnerable position.

And I was talking to businesses who said this was unsustainable. And, by the way, when I got here and I looked at how we were going to get control of our long-term debt, I realized that there was no way for us to control our long-term debt unless we reformed how our healthcare system works.

So there is no doubt that that is something that we had to do. Not because of what I hear in Washington, but because of what I've heard out in the country....

Here's the problem, though. If we didn't take on healthcare, then when were we going to take it on? And if we don't take it on, then when are we going to say to families when -- 2 years from now; 3 years from now; 4 years from now -- their premiums have gone up 30-40%? And have eaten into their wages. And in some cases, their health care's been dropped altogether

What am I going to say to the small businesses who just decide, "We can't afford to provide healthcare to our employees?"

And what am I going to say to the American people when we start talking seriously about how we get our medium- and long-term deficits under control?

... It is very important to look at the substance of this package and for the American people to understand that a lot of the fear mongering around this bill isn't true. I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there's some things in there that people don't like and legitimately don't like. If they think for example that there's a carve out for just one or two particular groups or interests, I think some of that, clearing out some of that under brush, moving rapidly...

Coming to a political campaign near you...

More corporate money.

The Supreme Court ruled today that corporations (and unions) can spend unlimited amounts of money in federal elections:

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted....

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, an author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, called the ruling “a terrible mistake.”

“Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns,” said Mr. Feingold, a Democrat.

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes the Supreme Court ever made was that corporations should be treated as "persons." Meanwhile, gays and lesbians are deprived of the right to marry because there relationships somehow aren't good enough.

Check out these older posts on a related Stephen Colbert piece and a documentary, The Corporation.

Re-grouping after the Brown-Coakley debacle

Nate Silver has some strategic and tactical advice for the Democrats which I'd boil down as: pass healthcare reform "as is," take advantage of what you now know to play a more effective game than you've been playing, and don't crawl into a bunker.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, is feeling gloomy about the staying power of the red-blue divide in America and the teabagger's nihilism. He does, however, encourage Obama to call the GOP's bluff and not count on passing real fiscal reform with any help from Washington Democrats. Instead, Sullivan suggests Obama should chart a bold course of his own that may, in fact, fail (which would still be a preferable outcome to continuing to work with the current corrupt political system (you know, the one that may have killed healthcare reform even after a massive victory for the party in 2008)).

Ezra Klein thinks that 24 hours after the Brown victory--and despite a dizzying day of Democratic despair--the chances of healthcare reform passing this year are stabilizing.

Personally I think that the results in Massachusetts were more due to how the Democrats are governing than concern about the party's goals. People in Massachusetts believe in universal healthcare... they have it! But they're disgusted by the deals that were cut with the senators like Lieberman (hiss) and Nelson in order to secure their votes. President Obama didn't follow through on a fully transparent process for negotiating healthcare reform as he promised during the campaign. And rather than make effective use of a 60-40 margin in the Senate, Democrats dithered for months and met endlessly with Republicans who were never going to support a reform bill anyway. Perhaps most of all the voters were fed up with the fact that despite all of the hope and optimism that accompanied Obama's inauguration last year, the tenor in Washington has only gotten worse as Republicans have simply been against everything.

Whatever your political leaning, if you sincerely believe that there are no problems for which government can provide a solution, then I wish an angel would show up and show you how miserable your life would be if the federal government had never existed.

Thank dog-spelled-backwards that Gail Collins can find humor in anything.

Politics and immediate gratification

Commenting on last night's election and the prospect of fading Democratic fortunes, as well as the Republicans' own failure to cement an enduring majority five years ago, the New York Times suggests that an FDR New Deal-kind of realignment in the American political landscape is unlikely in the 21st century:

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment also reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night. It was probably never very realistic for modern political thinkers of either party to dream of a 50-year reign. This century’s tectonic realignment is more likely to last 50 months or maybe 50 weeks, depending on how long it takes voters to seek out the latest offer or the newest best deal.

So given the magnitude and complexity of some of our problems--climate change, peak oil, and the growth of entitlement spending, particularly for healthcare--how does Washington develop enduring solutions when political power shifts so quickly?

ALSO IN THE TIMES TODAY, David Brooks draws an interesting analogy in a conversation with Gail Collins about what Democrats should do next given Scott Brown's victory last night:

Let’s say we had a year-long debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Let’s say at the end of that debate, 33 percent of Americans thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq, 46 percent thought it was a bad idea and the rest weren’t sure. Then let’s say that there were a bunch of elections in places like New Jersey and Virginia in the middle of this debate and George Bush’s party lost them all badly. Let’s say at the end of this debate there was a senate race in Wyoming in which a Democratic candidate made preventing the war a central plank in his campaign. Let’s say Bush went out to Wyoming and told voters they had to support the Republican to save the Iraq invasion. And let’s say the Democrat still went on to win that Wyoming Senate seat by more than 5 percentage points.

Would you have advised George Bush under these circumstances to go ahead and invade Iraq? Would you have advised him to call a special lame duck session of Congress to push through a war resolution before the new senator could be seated? Would you have advised him to invent some legislative trick so he could still have his invasion? Or would you have said, George, I know you really want to invade Iraq. I know you think an invasion will do a lot of good for the world. But the American people are pretty clear about this issue. Maybe you should show a little doubt. Maybe you ought to listen and give this whole thing a second look.

FOR THE OPPOSITE POINT OF VIEW, namely that Democrats should move forward with getting healthcare reform legislation to President Obama's desk, Ezra Klein has a number of good posts today here, here, here, here, and here.

A troubling read on the healthcare reform debate

The Economist looks at the newly elected senator from Massachusetts' position on healthcare reform and notes a fundamental problem with the American public's ability to deal with difficult problems:

The Massachusetts election is to a large extent a referendum on health-care reform, and health care is a complicated issue. Some on the left, like Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake, have a health-care position voters can understand: it's all the fault of the insurance companies and Big Pharma. That's not true and leads to no workable solution, but it makes progressives happy to hear it. Scott Brown has a health position voters can understand, too: it's all the fault of big government. That's not true and leads to no workable solution, but it makes conservatives happy to hear it. Barack Obama has a different position: it's the result of a set of systemic problems that need to be changed with a combination of government subsidies, regulations and market incentives, and to have a realistic shot at enacting a reform like that you need to get all the political and industry stakeholders involved and craft a compromise that better serves the public but that everyone can sign off on. That message is political poison, and it now has a significant percentage of the American public calling for his head.

The middle

Today I moved a few blocks, from the Pearl to 23rd Avenue, from a building less than ten years old to a home more than a hundred years old. I helped an old friend pack, a task I shared with another of his friends who I've just connected with despite our common circles. I witnessed two friends' wills. All of these activities reminded me of where I've been and where I'm going. And I hoped, vainly as it turned out, that Martha Coakley would miraculously pull off a victory in Massachusetts and keep hope alive for healthcare reform, climate change legislation, and the rest of President Obama's agenda.

I'm thinking that we speak so often of beginnings and endings, but each of us has, in fact, only one of each: our birth and our death. Everything else is the middle, with all other milestones being arbitrary.

At Wordstock one year, John Irving commented that the hardest part about writing a novel is coming up with beginnings: for chapters, for paragraphs, for the book itself. Unlike novels, our lives have no chapters. We may see large Roman numerals along the path, but they're projections, and mostly seen in retrospect. In reality we live all our lives in the middle, and this eddy I've felt stuck in for awhile now is my own construction. I've remarked again and again that I feel "in between": in between being young and being old, in between careers, in between where I've been and where I'm going. I've created a trap for myself by thinking that I'm in some temporary middle and endlessly looking for a new beginning. I think now that there's no other beginning to come. What there are, however, are dawns and new days of living in this long middle that is my life.

And so today I inhabit a new home, and study for another exam, and eat another meal, and share another afternoon with friends, and worry over the news, and mourn for what was lost, and hope for what will come. All the steps along the path of a long life fall in the middle, with the only true beginning always farther in the past, and the ending always an unknowable number of steps ahead.

And from this perspective it's a little easier to accept that my life's path doesn't always go uphill or downhill or whichever way I think it's supposed to go. I don't always have the same things with me at every step of the way, nor do I share the path with the same travelers at every point. If I could stand again at other places in the middle, there would be unknown treasures still ahead. And from my vantage point here--knowing that some of those "future" treasures have come into and slipped through my hands--reminds me that I don't know what is yet ahead. More to gain, more to learn, more to lose, more to mourn.

It's all the middle until the end.

Food for thought: dealing with poverty in the world

David Brooks has a column today in which he makes the case that the tragedy in Haiti is as much due to poverty as it is to the earthquake itself:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services.

He goes on to look at the developed world's poor track record in tackling poverty in the rest of the world:

Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The best we can hope for, Brooks writes, is that the world acknowledges that what's been tried up until now hasn't been successful and moves toward a new approach. He suggests that a workable solution needs to be based on an acceptance of the fact that some cultures are better than others at climbing out of poverty and that hard-nosed paternalism may be necessary, especially if it's driven by local leaders.

An unholy alliance: Beck & Palin

Here is a video segment from Glenn Beck's recent interview with Sarah Palin. Beck and Palin: two people who alarm me because of their mastery of demagoguery.

Andrew Sullivan comments (with some hyperbole) here and here. (He's also compiled a list of some of the provably false statements Palin's repeatedly made here).

Personally, I believe that Beck, Palin, and Fox News are primarily driven by greed (see a Daily Show comment on Beck in this regard here). At the same time, however, Palin has been a governor and a vice presidential candidate, and Fox News is clearly a media outlet with a very strong political orientation. Greed and a hunger for power often go hand in hand, and I agree with Sullivan that history does suggest that even in a modern democratic country, the combination of difficult economic times, a feeling of being unfairly treated, a vaguely defined but menacing "other," and a charismatic leader can be a fertile ground for the rise of fascism. Beck and Palin's rhetoric interweaves all of those themes, and both are charismatic people.

We need to be vigilant as long as Palin is a potential political candidate. Allowing ourselves to be complacent and thinking that "it couldn't happen here" reminds me of this quote:

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

-- Bertrand de Jouvenel

(Video link)

The decade in magazines

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I like this idea: tax big banks

The idea is to levy a tax against large banks that goes up as they get bigger. The argument is this: when banks become "too big to fail," the government may have to step in to rescue these huge institutions (as we've just seen, unfortunately). And the tax, if passed on to these banks' customers, might encourage those customers to move to smaller institutions which are less likely to destabilize the whole economy with any bad bets that they make. More here.

Helping those devastated by the earthquake in Haiti

If you're looking for a smaller relief organization that makes the most of every dollar, Portland-based Mercy Corps is a great way to go.

You can check out their updates on Haiti here and donate here. I just did.

Here's the latest coverage of the disaster from the New York Times.

The conservative case for gay marriage

Ted Olson, who is co-counsel for the plaintiffs trying to oveturn California's proposition 8, eloquently and convincingly makes the conservative case for gay marriage in the latest Newsweek. And he explains why prop. 8 is especially ripe for challenge:

California's Proposition 8 is particularly vulnerable to constitutional challenge, because that state has now enacted a crazy-quilt of marriage regulation that makes no sense to anyone. California recognizes marriage between men and women, including persons on death row, child abusers, and wife beaters. At the same time, California prohibits marriage by loving, caring, stable partners of the same sex, but tries to make up for it by giving them the alternative of "domestic partnerships" with virtually all of the rights of married persons except the official, state-approved status of marriage. Finally, California recognizes 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place in the months between the state Supreme Court's ruling that upheld gay-marriage rights and the decision of California's citizens to withdraw those rights by enacting Proposition 8.

So there are now three classes of Californians: heterosexual couples who can get married, divorced, and remarried, if they wish; same-sex couples who cannot get married but can live together in domestic partnerships; and same-sex couples who are now married but who, if they divorce, cannot remarry. This is an irrational system, it is discriminatory, and it cannot stand.

Americans who believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence, in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in the 14th Amendment, and in the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and equal dignity before the law cannot sit by while this wrong continues. This is not a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American one, and it is time that we, as Americans, embraced it.

More from the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.

More on what's making America increasingly ungovernable...

Including extreme right-wing hyperbole from people like John McCain and Dick Cheney, in the latest Times column from Andrew Sullivan.

McCain actually said this:

President Obama is leading an extreme, left-wing crusade to bankrupt America.

Wow.

Song of the day

"Under the Ivy" by Kate Bush, a song I first heard in Portland in 2002. And in further checking out Kate a few days later, I resolved a mystery from my junior high years: who was the woman who appeared one night on Saturday Night Live and sung a song that mesmerized me and had all the boys talking in the locker room the next day. It was Kate; she sang "Them Heavy People" on December 9, 1978. Turns out this was her only appearance on American television. Serendipity...

(Video link)

That episode also included Dan Akroyd's classic Julia Child skit. :-)

America as Rome (in decline)

James Fallows of The Atlantic has written a great article ("How America Can Rise Again") about the state of America's malaise: Are we in decline? Are we Rome? He's just returned from living in China for three years, and that experience along with his many years of interernational travel lead him to believe that American society is as vibrant and adaptive as ever. Anxiety about America's decline has been with us since the birth of the republic, he writes, even though measuring ourselves against other powers (which these days means China) has really only been an issue since World War II.

Our true worry, he believes, is whether our government has become too fixed in its way to continue to adapt along with the private sector:

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. If Henry Adams were whooshed from his Washington of a century ago to our Washington of today, he would find it shockingly changed, except for the institutions of government. Same two political parties, same number of members of the House (since 1913, despite more than a threefold increase in population), essentially same rules of debate in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.

Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

Unfortunately, Fallows isn't particularly hopeful. He notes that most of the world's democracies are parliamentarian and wonders if our founders may have made some mistakes in designing our own legislature (e.g. the Senate, where more than half of the U.S. population is represented by only 20 of the 100 total votes and which frequently require a 60% supermajority to pass any legislation).

Fallows' assessment of our options as a nation match my own worries about the prospect of getting older:

Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But [historian Kevin] Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional—but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time—and our children’s, and their grandchildren’s—rather than succumb.

Fallows' article includes this quote from John Adams:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Which returns me to thoughts of "Ozymandias" and the impermanence of all that happens on this pale blue dot. And to the enigmatic words of Candide, that "we must cultivate our garden."

Poem for the day

An old standard by Shelley, "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Taking steps along the way while bared teeth gnash inside

Wednesday night I went to the first session of my EMT-Basic course; it was mostly an orientation. Today was the first full day of instruction. My goal is to get certified and work as an EMT for a year. Doing so will satisfy the healthcare work experience requirement for the physician assistant program in which I'm interested. And in Oregon, EMT-B's are allowed to operate with a larger scope of practice than the national standard specifies.

As I learned some of the basic techniques for stabilizing and transporting patients today, I could visualize myself working as an EMT. I expect that it's going to be a difficult (and sometimes grisly) job, but I know that I'll get great experience that will make me an even better PA than if I went ahead and got my master's without any healthcare background. For the first time in a long time, I've got a clearer picture of getting there.

Still, sometimes it feels like the path just gets longer.

And even with this new clarity I'm feeling about my career change, I am still dragging myself down with thoughts about other problems. If I had only one area of my life that felt like it wasn't working, it would be one thing. But right now I'm not feeling so fortunate.

Today on my drive home from my EMT course, I felt the war of the wolves going on within me, perhaps more acutely than I've ever experienced.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

I gotta be careful who I'm feeding. And on that note, it's time to start some practice again, probably meditation.

Om...

Reality bites, January 2010-style

Today is a reality bites kind of day, my last post about Doris Day notwithstanding. It's a day when I, and several people in my life, are facing the consequences of past decisions and figuring out where to go and what to do next. It's a day when the economic news on the radio is too much, and I just press OFF. It's a day for dealing with the postponed. It's a day when mortality isn't as conceptual as it mostly is.

It's a day when I could use a Doris Day movie. Que sera sera...

But I've got five chapters to read before tomorrow's class.

Reality bites.

It's her turn

I agree: give Doris Day a special Oscar. :-)

Song of the day

My favorite U2 song, "New Year's Day." Those orgasmic chords!

(Video link)

Senator Ensign dodges for all he's worth

Under refreshingly persistent questioning by CNN's Rick Sanchez, Senator John Ensign of Nevada repeatedly refers to previous statements he's made and avoids answering any of Sanchez' queries. So, if you're so confident that everything will "work out in time," Senator, why can't you answer a question instead of suggesting the interviewer should do "research" rather than question his guest?

(Video link)