Washington DC | November 3

AP - Republicans boycotted the start of committee debate Tuesday on a bill to curb greenhouse gases, protesting that the bill's costs have not been fully examined. The action put a spotlight on the difficulties Democratic leaders face in moving climate legislation this year.

Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio attended the session for 15 minutes to explain the GOP's argument for staying away. He insisted the tactic ''is not a ruse'' to block the bill, but concern that its widespread impact on the country has not been made clear.

But Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the panel's chairman, argued the EPA already has provided ''a full blown economic analysis'' and that Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised further studies when the bill is merged with other legislation. She insisted ''we're not rushing we are taking our time.''

The partisan rift in the Environment and Public Works Committee, which delayed votes on amendments to the legislation, exposed the sharp divisions in the Senate over how to address global warming. Democrats also have been split on the issue. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who said he had deep reservations about the bill also was absent.

Kelly O'Donnell and Mark Murray | November 3

MSNBC - The House and Senate are together this morning in the House chamber for a joint session, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses Congress.

Note that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson (R) -- who yelled "You lie" at President Obama during the last joint session -- will be an escort for Merkel. Wilson was selected by the GOP leadership.

Triumph of the Money Party

Michael Collins

Do you know what the "public option" does or who it covers? If you've had trouble finding out, it's not your fault. Reading corporate media coverage provides little or no clue. It's hardly ever defined. There's a very good reason for the lack of clarity and definition. But first, a brief summary of the public debate that characterizes just about every public debate we have on critical issues.

Damn these guys are good. At fucking us over, that is. Remember when the public rose up and rejected the TARP bail-out? Congressmen were flooded with calls, did their duty and voted against the bill. Then the propoganda machine went to work. A few meaningless concessions were made, the bill was repackaged and passed.

Not only are you going to eat shit, you're going to like eating shit. Got it?

Now it appears Ron Paul's audit the fed bill is doomed to similar fate. Congress can't ignore public outcry for tranparency so they're busy removing teeth from the bill. They'll pass some meaningless drivel that allows the powers that be to continue fucking us over and claim victory on behalf of the American public.

Ain't democracy wonderful?

Oct 31

AFP - The US House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to reject the UN's Goldstone report, which accuses Israel and Palestinian militants of war crimes in Gaza.

The bipartisan proposal calls on President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration" of the Goldsone report, dismissing it as "irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy."

The measure also "reaffirms its support for the democratic, Jewish state of Israel, for Israel's security and right to self-defense," as well as "Israel's right to defend its citizens from violent militant groups and their state sponsors."

When will Congress reaffirm its support for the rights of Palestinians? Don't hold your breath, I can see Congress disavowing the report...except for wrongs done by Palestine

Ellen Nakashima and Paul Kane | Oct 30

WaPo - House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

The ethics committee is one of the most secretive panels in Congress, and its members and staff members sign oaths not to disclose any activities related to its past or present investigations. Watchdog groups have accused the committee of not actively pursuing inquiries; the newly disclosed document indicates the panel is conducting far more investigations than it had revealed.

Shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, the committee chairman, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), interrupted a series of House votes to alert lawmakers about the breach. She cautioned that some of the panel's activities are preliminary and not a conclusive sign of inappropriate behavior.

"No inference should be made as to any member," she said.

Rep. Jo Bonner (Ala.), the committee's ranking Republican, said the breach was an isolated incident.

The 22-page "Committee on Standards Weekly Summary Report" gives brief summaries of ethics panel investigations of the conduct of 19 lawmakers and a few staff members. It also outlines the work of the new Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent body that initiates investigations and provides recommendations to the ethics committee. The document indicated that the office was reviewing the activities of 14 other lawmakers. Some were under review by both ethics bodies.

New from Politico is that Sen. Lieberman will filibuster the Reid plan if it contains the public option:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill.

Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid’s has said the Senate bill will.

If I were Reid I would tell Lieberman this: "if you join the Republicans on this your committee assignments and all privileges with the Democrats are done. You are toast."

It won't, however, happen.

Still: dude's not a Democrat. Time to kick his ass out of the party.

Harry Reid is expected to announce that the "public option" in current healthcare reform legislation will have a state by state opt out clause. From the Times:

The Senate health care legislation will include a government-run insurance plan, but states would be allowed to “opt out” of it, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, will announce officially on Monday afternoon, Senate Democratic aides said.

How would states do this?

Mr. Reid’s office has not released any details. In theory, states that wish to opt out of the public plan would have to adopt a law to do so, which would require agreement between the state legislature and the governor.

I think that is a reasonable hurdle, or to put it another way, an acceptable compromise, because it is a hurdle. It puts the burden on state legislators to justify why they think their state shouldn't be a part of the plan.

That being said, I don't like The National Journal's take on it:

Reid's apparent intent to move ahead with a public option, including an opt-out, has led some Senate aides to suggest Reid is readying a strategy in which he might lose the cloture vote but then quickly bring to the floor a bill with a compromise public option designed to attract more centrists.
That approach would reduce the chance of attacks from liberals by proving that the votes are not there for a more robust public option, an aide to a centrist senator said.

That, on the other hand, doesn't surprise me and would be very typically of the Senator from Nevada. Is it an attempt to water the bill down and sell out progressives? Might very well be.

Millions of Americans are politically informed, smart, active and angry. They see many wrongs in our political and government system. They are fed up with politics as usual, meaning corrosive corruption of politicians by corporate and other special interests. They see little good in either the Democrat or Republican parties. And they almost always share a common bond: They love and honor the US Constitution, even though they may see some flaws in it. Yet they are also constitutional hypocrites.

Please read the rest of my article at:

http://www.nolanchart.com/article6955.html

September 17

Ian Welsh -One constant theme which needs dealing with is the idea that the country is more conservative than liberal and that centrists are needed to hold off horrible conservative things from happening...

When I look at the US what I see is a banana republic. And then I see people who think that the Senate, or even the House, actually does what the American people want...Oh, Congress will sometimes do what the majority want—when that’s what it was going to do anyway. The plan to fix this is simple enough and always has been. Obama was a right wing democrat and this was clear early... Once he was chosen as the nominee I told people ... to take their time and money and spend it on electing progressive members of Congress, where that amount of money and volunteers could be decisive.

People who hold progressive and liberal policy views are a much larger proportion of the population than the right wing crazies are, they are in fact a majority of the population, though you’d never know it from listening to the gnashing of teeth of some folks.

If the right wing crazies could capture the Republican party, liberals and progressives, who already make up the largest block in the House, and who massively outnumber Blue Dogs, can certainly do the same to the Democratic party.

Dems connect 4 vertebrae, 20 more to go...

While watching the president’s address to congress last week, a startling revelation hit me. It wasn’t the sharp divisiveness, echoic though it was of a congress in, say, 1860. Nor was it that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi wore similar red outfits. That could be settled in the Burr-Hamilton tradition. Nor was it that Joe Wilson behaved like a boozy hockey fan angered by a high-sticking call. I was aghast at the number of toupées I saw in the members of congress.

It wasn’t half, a third, or even a quarter. But the occasional camera sweep of the crowd showed more than a few men with an ungainly clump of someone else’s hair sitting ungraciously atop an obviously barren pate.

More at Roll Call

Courtesy of Glenn Beck, America’s #1 Teabag Gasbag, around 60,000 protestors marched on Capitol Hill today, and a more motley crowd you never saw. I use the word motley in the sense of incongruous or nonsensical, as evidenced by the protest signs they were carrying. Barack Obama can be many things to many people, but he cannot be a Marxist, Nazi, Socialist, Fascist, Kenyan Muslim Jew all at the same time.

You can’t have a protest if the crowd can’t agree on what it is protesting. By caricaturing Obama as the embodiment of all evil (quite a few signs depicted him as Satan), the protestors lost not only cohesion, but also coherence. So maybe the way to describe what this Teabag party had in common was “anger.” Also, they were virtually all white people, most of them baby boomers, no doubt a few of them carrying concealed weapons, and the overwhelming number of them seriously overweight. But here again, we get back to incongruity. How can anyone take your protest against socialized medicine seriously when you are marching in your motorized scooter, bought for you by Medicare?

All Spin Zone writes:

Joe Wilson (R-SC) played the role of GOP street thug last night. Submitted for your consideration: low level hit men don’t go out and take a whack at the opposition’s “Don” unless the family Capo approves in advance.

Sounds about right to me.

Disgraceful. It's never happened. Until now. Republican vitriol has gone too far. Rep. Wilson should resign. Or Congress should censure him. Period. End. Of. Story.

In response to the question of whether support for any non-laughable health reform bill from "moderate" Republicans like Chuck Grassley was ever a possibility, Lindsay Beyerstein nails it:

"Simple answers to simple questions: No, there was never any realistic prospect of getting Chuck Grassley to support healthcare reform. Grassley is a Republican and, unlike Democrats, Republicans have party discipline. Scuttling health reform is the GOP's number one priority. It should have been clear from the outset that any plan that depended on the cooperation of Republicans was doomed."

When you get beyond the by-now reflexive timidity of most Democrats on hot issues, the Dems' second-biggest mistake is their having confused party discipline with goose-stepping anti-democracy. The two are not the same, and although they sometimes go together, they don't have to.

For instance: ironclad party discipline in the service of a dishonest war or the smearing of a popular idea such as a public health care option is indeed anti-democratic discipline. It is the closing of ranks to sabotage the public will or the public interest. But ironclad party discipline to hold together the votes needed for a bill that will give a majority of Americans the choice they want in health care is pro-democratic discipline. It is the force required to fend off reactionary opposition to giving non-wealthy Americans a slightly fairer shake. Stern party unity for the sake of greater social or economic equality is not a vice. It is a virtue.

As I wrote a few days ago. It was only a matter of time until the Republicans politicize the death of Senator Kennedy. They are nothing if not predictable. As Ian has noted ad nauseum: they know how to be an opposition party.

First from the Times of London:

Democrats were accused of exploiting the death of Senator Edward Kennedy yesterday after immediately trying to use his name to revive President Obama’s flagging attempt to overhaul the US healthcare system.

Ed Feulner, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, chastised Democrats for invoking Mr Kennedy in their push for healthcare reform.

He said: “It is wrong and tactless to use Senator Kennedy’s death, or anyone’s, simply to advance a particular policy agenda. This is a time for genuine tribute, not crass politics.”

More after the jump.

This news, only a little earlier than anticipated, still shocks me and greatly saddens me.

Now and then I start to write posts in which I would grapple with and, mostly for my own sake, try to account for my own transformation from a rather uninformed conservative youth to a self identified liberal. I usually gave up and never posted.

Dammit, I am actually sobbing as I read the obits.

But I can't say why I will miss Ted Kennedy without describing how my attitude toward his politics and his political skills changed over the years.

Several years and a lifetime ago I read the first three books of Colleen McCullough's 'Master's Of Rome' series. She documents the rise (and fall) of Marius in books one and two and Sulla's march on Rome and the subsequent proscriptions of his enemies and his installation of Pompey as a cat's paw of sorts and his restoration of Caesar, whom Marius had banished to a life of sacerdotal restriction when he appointed him Flamen Dialis. So much for the plot-line of the three historical novels.

What I'm struck by today is a scene in the first novel, titled, "The First Man in Rome." Marius has yet to be consul more than once. He's agitating for it in the Senate. Customary Roman law at the time was that no man could be consul more than once without an intervening period of about ten years--if memory serves me. All kinds of skullduggery is happening in the Senate but the Senate is ably led by a patrician named Marcus Aemelius Scaurus. And Scaurus is the last great Princeps Senatus. I say the last great princeps senatus, because although he was a patrician and had all the flaws of a patrician, he still ably withstood the emerging divide in the Roman republican consensus, which led to the populares and optimates and the civil wars, and in the end, he always did what was in the republic's best interests. His successors were nothing like him, lackeys of the optimates all.

I am reminded of this man on the day of Ted Kennedy's death. Like Scaurus, Kennedy was a patrician and had all the faults a man from that class would have. The mistakes of his early life are proof. But, in the end, he always rose above his wealthy origins to support the broader interests of the people and our American republic writ large.

I can only hope that his passing does not mark a descent into republican immolation as it did in the Roman republic. If ever there were an American princeps senatus, it was Ted Kennedy.

What kind of utter lamage is this? I mean, seriously, last time I checked the Democrats had 60 votes now in the Senate, right? And how many of Obama's appointees are in place? Less than 50%

Huzzah for unity porn!

On a serious note, Obama, to my mind, has about three or four months, at the most, to figure it out. After that, the Republicans are going to eat him and his brand of bi-partisanship alive. And yes, when the Republicans win back a majority in the House in 2010 I will say I told you so.

Jonathan Karl | Washington DC | August 5

ABC News - Call it Jets for Junkets. Congress is poised to spend $200 million to buy the Air Force three of the highest performing passenger jets in the world, including two planes that will be used for members of Congress and other government VIPs.

The money is included in the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House July 30 by a vote of 400 to 30.

The jets are military versions of the Gulfstream G550, a passenger jet with a cruising speed of more than 600 miles per hour that is capable of flying non-stop from Washington to Beijing without refueling.

The Pentagon had only asked for one jet, which it intends to use for its new Africa Command.

Money for the other two was inserted by the House Appropriations Committee, which also inserted a requirement that the jets be used by the Air Force's 89th Airlift Wing, which is based at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and provides transportation for government VIPs -- including members of Congress.

Josh Rogin | Washington | August 5

MSNBC - If it takes shutting down the Senate to block the Obama administration from moving prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil, that’s exactly what some Republican senators plan to do.

Following several reports Aug. 3 that the White House was debating two distinct proposals for dealing with more than 250 prisoners still housed at the detention facility at the U.S. military base in Cuba, senators from various parts of the country pledged to fight any attempt to move the terrorism suspects to the United States, severely complicating President Obama’s plan to close the prison by January.

Roberta Rampton | Washington | July 28

Reuters - The U.S. meat sector on Tuesday urged Congress to lift a ban that effectively prevents Chinese poultry imports in order to avoid retaliation on their own exports to China.

U.S. law allows any of the other 152 countries that belong to the World Trade Organization to be able to apply to export meat to the the United States, and it is unfair that China has been singled out, a coalition of meat companies and trade groups said in a testimony to a House committee that has championed the ban.

"We will not be able to avoid a serious trade confrontation with China if Congress does not reconsider" the measure, trade lawyer Kevin Brosch said, speaking for the coalition in remarks prepared for the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee.

China has launched a WTO complaint about the ban, and trade groups said China recently stopped issuing import permits for U.S. chicken in retaliation, threatening the largest market for U.S. poultry, worth almost $700 million per year.

The Forgotten Question in the Health Care Debate

Rationed care. Image

Do you deserve to die?

Do your friends and family?

Scenario 1: You've just been diagnosed with a cancer of the lymphatic system. You're told that it requires a procedure within the next two weeks. Unfortunately, you were laid off from your corporate job 11 months, 30 days ago. You are on your last day of COBRA. Your company retirement and savings are all gone. You can't afford the $1,200 a month premium needed to continue your coverage. Without the operation, you will die. Do you deserve to die?

Scenario 2: Your spouse has a long history of illness. Then you discover she has a virulent infection that, if untreated, threatens to disable her to the point where she's immobile and requires 'round the clock medical care. You work for yourself. While you have catastrophic health insurance, it doesn't cover the needed treatment nor does it provide for nursing care. Does your wife deserve to experience this untreated sickness and suffering until her premature death?

Do you or your family members deserve to die simply because the rulers of this country can't get their act together to provide universal health care?

Do your friends and neighbors deserve the same fate?

continue reading after the jump