Fox ‘News’? NOT!

From AlterNet: “Eight Reasons Fox is Not a news Organization.

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama’s election, the cable channel’s hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox “is operating basically as a talk-radio format,” and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda — who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O’Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators — on video — and to vilify others.

Murdoch’s agenda is simple: He’s against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch’s agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees…

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer — No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation’s capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that’s exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington – AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer’s town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show’s sponsors after Beck claimed the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture,” Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he’s more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?..

2. Fox’s alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity — We’ve scratched our heads trying to come up with an analogous relationship between a cable news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings, but we came up empty.

Americans For Prosperity, a group that received funding from Koch Industries, an oil-and-energy company and major polluter, also organized this summer’s town hall disrupters. Although they kicked off their rabble-rousing campaign by galvanizing opposition to health care reform, their real target appears to be energy reform, especially the cap-and-trade provision that will make dirty industries pay a pretty penny to pollute.

3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs — Fox News personalities encourage viewers to contribute money to, and visit the Web sites of, specific Republican-affiliated political action committees. We can’t find a single instance of either CNN or MSNBC doing anything of the kind for Democratic causes.

Oh, sure, Keith Olbermann raised money for free health clinics for the uninsured, but it’s our understanding that there are uninsured Republicans. And Rachel Maddow raised money for jerseys for an Iraqi baseball team (who learned the game from American troops), but last time we looked, baseball was the Great American Bipartisan Pastime.

4. Bill O’Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn’t like — We exhausted all avenues of research trying to find a news show host at another cable news channel who pays his producer to stalk people whose opinions he or she doesn’t like. Came up with bupkus. Nor could we find one who locked the media out of remarks she or he was delivering in acceptance of an award from a nonprofit group.

At the annual conference of the religious-right political group, Family Research Council Action, O’Reilly received an award for his vilification of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was an abortion provider who was gunned down in his church by a man who obviously took to heart references by O’Reilly and others, “Tiller the baby-killer.”

5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods — Once upon a time, Chris Wallace, son of the aforementioned Mike, was a real journalist, just like his dad. Then he joined the Fox team, as host of Fox News Sunday, which airs on the Fox’s broadcast network.

6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or just make up stuff — Promoting the notion that their organization is on some sort of Nixonian White House “enemies list,” Fox News personalities first trotted out the “enemies list” theme in August, when they suggested that the White House, asking for Americans to send the administration any unsolicited e-mails they received that promoted false information about health care reform legislation, was actually compiling an “enemies list.”

7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group — During the run-up to the big right-wing 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington, Fox News entities and personalities repeatedly flogged viewers to join the Tea Party Express, a bus tour of anti-Obama activists.

Advising viewers on “how you can join” the tour, Fox and Friends hosted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams, vice chairman of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, who is a part of the birther conspiracy movement of people who contend that Obama wasn’t born in America. At the Fox Nation Web site, viewers were treated to a promotional piece that asked, “Will You Join the Tea Party Express?” We don’t see the other cable news outlets soliciting members for, say, MoveOn.org.

8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies — Here’s a Beck exclusive you won’t hear on any of the other cable news networks: OnStar, the GPS/emergency-alert system available in General Motors cars, is being indirectly funded by the auto-industry bailout so the government can spy on you.

To be fair, Beck said this on his radio program, which is not a Fox News product, which is also where he compared the situation of Fox News to that of Jews during the Holocaust (with other news outlets acting as silent bystanders). In the same segment, he cast Obama as a “brutal dictator.”

But statements such as these seem to serve no detriment to his Fox News career. (Compare this to MSNBC, where David Shuster got sidelined for a month during the height of campaign season for a bad choice of words regarding Chelsea Clinton stumping for her mom.) And there’s no shortage of outrageous and paranoid material to choose from from Beck’s television show, much of it reported, blogged or cataloged by AlterNet.”

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/143456/8_reasons_fox_is_not_a_news_organization?page=entire

Have heart- approval rising for Health Insurance Reform!

The ship is turning!

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Trevor Tompson, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The fever has broken. The patient is out of intensive care. But if you’re President Barack Obama, you can’t stop pacing the waiting room. Health care overhaul is still in guarded condition.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to Obama’s health care remake dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress.

The public is split 40-40 on supporting or opposing the health care legislation, the poll found. An even split is welcome news for Democrats, a sharp improvement from September, when 49 percent of Americans said they opposed the congressional proposals and just 34 percent supported them.

Anger about health care boiled over during August. Lawmakers returning home for town hall meetings faced outcries that the government was trying to take over the system, ushering in higher costs, lower quality — even rationing and euthanasia.

“It’s very significant that there’s an upturn in support for the plans because after August there was a sense that the whole effort was beginning to decline and would not come back in terms of public support,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor who tracks public opinion on health care.

“Even with this,” added Blendon, “the country is still divided over whether or not moving ahead is the right thing to do.”

Behind the shift seems to be a growing determination among Democrats that going forward would be better. Meanwhile, political independents don’t appear as alarmed about the congressional proposals as they were just a few weeks ago. Still, opponents remain more passionate in their convictions than do supporters.

In a significant change, opposition among older Americans dropped 16 percentage points. Seniors have been concerned that Congress would stick them with the bill by cutting Medicare to pay for covering the uninsured. Among the most reliable voters, they were much more wary of the changes than the public as a whole. The gap has narrowed.

The poll found that 68 percent of Democrats support the congressional plans, up from 57 percent in early September. Opposition among independents plunged from 51 percent to 36 percent. However, only 29 percent of independents currently support the plans in Congress.

Among seniors, opposition fell from 59 percent in September to 43 percent now. Almost four in 10, 38 percent, now support it, compared with 31 percent in September…Republicans remain solidly against the congressional health care plans, with four out of five opposed.

Americans overwhelmingly say it’s important that health care legislation have the support of both parties.

Blendon credits Obama’s speech to Congress in early September and his blitz of media interviews and appearances since then for moving public opinion toward the positive column. What some have criticized as presidential hyperactivity, many Americans took as a sign that the president was taking ownership of the issue, Blendon said.

Before his prime-time speech to Congress, 52 percent disapproved of Obama’s handling of health care. Now the public is split, with 48 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving.

“Getting more directly involved in the outcome is what people expect a president to be doing,” said Blendon.

There’s still deep skepticism that the government can fix the health care system to expand coverage and tamp down rising costs…

The congressional bills would require all Americans to get health insurance, either through an employer, through a government program or on their own. Tax credits would be offered for many of those who buy their own coverage but failure to comply could result in a fine.

“I don’t think that the government should supply health care to the people,” said Newcomb.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Oct. 1-5, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,003 adults age 18 or older, contacted by telephone on land lines and cell phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points for results based on the entire sample.”

(Emphasis mine)

see:http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2009/10/opposition_to_obamas_health_re.html

Emotional maturity and the politics of spite

Krugman, NY Times: ” There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.

Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.

But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.”

Right on - emphasis mine.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ref=todayspaper

Progress on our public option

Don’t despair, the public option is still there…

Robert Creamer writes in HuffPost: “In a surprising vote Tuesday, ten Democrats voted to add a public option to the most conservative of the five health insurance reform bills working their way through Congress. That’s just two votes short of passage.

This robust support for the public option — in what most observers consider the most conservative committee in the Senate — signals a sea change in Congressional opinion toward the public option. The odds are now very high that some form of public health insurance option will be included on the final bill when it emerges from a House-Senate Conference Committee later this fall and is ultimately passed by Congress.  In the midst of the right-wing, town hall onslaught last August, the pundits…

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html?view=print

The three bills that have passed House Committees, and the Senate Health Committee bill, all contain a public option. And increasingly it appears that the strongest form of public option will come out of the House.

A Robert Woods Johnson Report indicates that over the last ten years wages have gone up 29%, health insurance rates have gone up 120% and the profits of the private health insurance industry have gone up 428%. No wonder they don’t want competition.

So why the resurgent Congressional support for a strong public option? There are three reasons:

1) First and foremost, voters’ support for a public health insurance option is as strong as ever. All of the right-wing talk about a “government takeover” has not fooled voters who are forced every day to deal with the stranglehold that the private insurance industry has on their health care.

Last weekend’s New York Times poll showed that 65% of all voters support giving Americans the choice of a public option and only 26% oppose it.

More importantly, the public option is also popular in swing Congressional districts. The firm of Anzeloni Liszt just released the results of a poll it conducted in 91 Blue Dog, Rural Caucus and Frontline districts. The poll found that 54% of the voters in these battleground districts support the choice of a public option.

And the poll also found that the voters in these districts want reform and want it this year. The polling report says:

Overall, 58% of voters believe the health care system is in need of major reform or a complete overhaul, and almost 59% are concerned that Congress will not take action on health care reform this year. The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.

Those kinds of polling results get the attention of Members of Congress.

2) Members of Congress have begun to realize that they will have to live with the consequences of what they pass for years to come. And what the voters will care about in the future will not be slogans or ideology. Once the program is passed, the voters will care most about one thing: affordability.”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html?view=print

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html?view=print

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html

How will the growing number of ‘no religion’ voters impact politics?

Dan Gilgoff, US News:”How will the boom in Americans claiming “no religion”—25 percent of the country will fit into that category in 20 years, according to a Trinity College survey out today—alter national politics?

I see four big ways:

1. Secular voters will become an increasingly important component of the Democratic base.

In the 1990s, so-called religious nones comprised 6 percent of the Democratic Party and 6 percent of theGOP. Today, there are two and a half times as many nones—34 million Americans, or 15 percent of the country—and they account for 16 percent of Democrats, compared with just 8 percent of Republicans. Three in four of them voted for Barack Obama in the last election. Every indication is that these political trends will continue.

Even as the Democratic Party has seriously stepped up its faith outreach, then, the fact that the fastest-growing religious group in the United States is those with no religious affiliation—and that members of that group are leaning dramatically in the Democratic direction—will make the Dems pay closer attention to them.

2. American politics will become more polarized.

As more Americans leave religion, the ones left in the pews are those most committed to their faith. In a nation where church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting behavior—the more often you attend, the more likely you are to vote Republican—this polarization of religious life will spill over into the political arena, setting off more culture-war battles.

3. Republicans will have to choose between becoming a more overtly religious party and reaching out more seriously to the growing secular middle.

Secular voters once constituted an important part of the GOP coalition, but fewer than 10 percent of religious nones under age 30 are Republican. “Republican nones are getting older and continue to show an affinity to the GOP,” says Juhen Navarro-Rivera, a Trinity College research fellow who helped compile the new report. “But they’re not making new Republican nones.”

Navarro-Rivera is still running the numbers, but his hunch is that the new generation of religious nones has been scared away from the Republican Party because of its ties to the Christian right. Does the GOP continue to embrace that movement or move more to the middle? Call it the Sarah Palin option versus the John McCain option. (Though opposition to healthcare reform, it should be noted, is helping bring the two camps together.)

4. If secular voters become more aggressively antireligious, the Democrats’ newfound faithiness faces big challenges.

If religious nones congeal into a coherent voting bloc with their own issues, Democrats will have to pay more attention to their political agenda. Most religious nones aren’t hostile to religion; few are atheists. “They’re aligning with the Democrats because the party has lots of religious people, but they’re not pushy about it,” says Navarro-Rivera.

At the same time, religious nones aren’t crazy about a huge role for religion in government and politics. And as their numbers grow, some expect them to turn more overtly antireligious. Will they continue to tolerate a party leader who invites Rick Warren to his inauguration and who refuses to decide whether religious groups can hire based on religion with government funds? Doubtful.

see: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/09/22/4-ways-the-no-religion-boom-will-alter-american-politics.html

Conservative Radicals and the Politics of Vengeance

Bill Moyers: In the following interview, Bill Moyers and powerhouse NYT editor and author of “The Death of Conservatism Sam Tanenhaus discuss the last gasps of the conservative movement. Tanenhaus says that far from signifying a resurgence of conservative ideals, the Tea Party protesters and shock jocks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh spell the doom of the conservative movement.

BILL MOYERS: Conservatives were out in force in Washington last weekend. They had come to express their opposition to big government, to taxes and wasteful spending, and health care reform they fear would lead to a nightmare of bureaucracy. Max Blumenthal, author of REPUBLICAN GOMORRAH waded into their midst to sample opinions.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So you’re saying if the government eliminates Social Security and Medicare then you’ll get out of the program?

WOMAN: No, I said if they get out of my life.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Out of your Social Security and-

WOMAN: No, out of everything.

BILL MOYERS: But they had also come to deplore and denounce President Obama- in their minds a tyrant akin to Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.

MAN: I’m afraid he’s going to do what Hitler could never do and that’s destroy the United States of America.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And what’s the Obama revolution, what’s going to happen?

MAN: Similar to Germany, like what Hitler did. He took over the auto industry, did he not? He took over the banking, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police, Acorn is an extension of that.

BILL MOYERS: They had found a new hero in Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican whose shout heard ’round the world was now the rallying cry of the weekend.

CROWD: You lie! You lie!

BILL MOYERS: Glenn Beck, their favorite pundit, had promoted this march and was reveling in its success….

So what do we make of this new book titled THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM? Has the author Sam Tanenhaus spent his time and considerable talent on a premature obituary?

Sam Tanenhaus edits two of the most influential sections of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES – the Book Review and the Week in Review. He’s has had a long fascination with conservatives and conservative ideas. He wrote this acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, the journalist who spied for the Russians before he became fiercely anti-communist and a hero to conservatives. Now Tanenhaus is working on a biography of the conservative icon William F. Buckley JR.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus.

SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: So, if you’re right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?

SAM TANENHAUS: I’m afraid they’re radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time — this is what my book describes narratively — between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We’re seeing the revanchist side.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?

SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that’s based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that’s been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for ‘revenge.’ It’s a politics of vengeance….

And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we’re seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We’re seeing it now– they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.

BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it’s a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, “creedal documents” they’re sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.

BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says–

SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there’s a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we’ve seen is that certain groups among us– and sometimes it’s been the left– have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that’s what we’re seeing now.

BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?

SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.

BILL MOYERS: There’s a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they’re against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don’t want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying “Don’t touch my Medicare.” You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.

SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it’s very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. “Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won’t take my Medicare away. Don’t know Medicare is a government program?” That’s not really what’s going on, I think. I think there’s something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we’ve become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, “We all expect too much from government.” We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life”. So, when people say, “Don’t take my Medicare away,” what they really mean is, “We’re entirely dependent on this government and we’re afraid they’ll take one thing away that we’ve gotten used to and replace it with something that won’t be so good. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re powerless before the very guardian that protects us.”

BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what’s the dominant force that’s going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, “We want reform and we want the government involved?” Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?

SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we’ll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here’s another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell’s theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight’s about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces– were really Republican issues.

Today, when we look at the great questions — how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They’ve vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That’s one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.

BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they’re not simply in retreat, they’re outmoded. They don’t act like it, you know?

SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don’t. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, “The Democrat Socialist Party.” This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, “The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right.” I think we’re hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there’s been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don’t think of them as conservative anymore– Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla– they’ve all left the movement. And so, it’s become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.

BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it’s ideologically depleted. That what we’re seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley’s phrase. There’s a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble — the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way.

And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you’re well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, “You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They’re anti-communists. And they’re helping our movement.”

Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, “Enough.” Buckley himself had matured politically. He’d run for Mayor of New York. He’d seen how politics really worked. And he said, “We can’t allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe.” So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its “drivel” were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that’s what we may not see if we don’t have that kind of leadership on the right now.

BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the ’60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley’s seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint– to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.

SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act–…Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there’s no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.

see: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/142754

Obama (And America) won August!

Why? How? When?

Marc Ambinder, the Atlantic: “…the White House was taken aback by the ferocity of the health care debate, the media was confused, activists were alarmed, and Republican enthusiasm shot up. But a funny thing happened on the way to the morgue…

The worst thing that could have happened to Democrats — and the one thing that needed to happen in order to kill health reform — did not happen. The Democrats held together. Moderates were not intimidated. Don’t confuse their constituent meeting pander with changed minds.

Did more than a handful — if any — Democrats who were leaning towards voting “yes” on health care before August change their minds during August? Probably not. Another irony: the public option debate helped. It helped by offering itself up as a sacrifice. The new Maginot line, drawn by advocates of a single payer system, turned out to be a bit of a feint because it was never the sine qua non of reform.  Initially, given the GOP success (aided by progressive elites who essentially agreed) in framing the option as essential to health care, its putative failure and demagoguery seemed to be a significant blow to the White House. But — and here is the key point — it became something for the Blue Dogs to “oppose” and thus satisfy their constituents’ concerns about reform in general…the White House would rather have the bill they’re probably going to get now and worry about Netroot anxiety later. From the start, the least convincing argument made to the White House about strategy starts with the premise that compromising with recalcitrant Republicans is inherently bad.

After August, under the worst case scenario, there is majority support for the following major changes to health care: real (albeit limited) competition in the insurance industry (even absent a public plan). A cap on what a person pays for catastrophic illnesses. An end to insurance company recision policies. Guaranteed issue. A basic benefit package. Significant subsidies to help people who earn as much as $64,000 a year pay for health insurance. Better cost and coverage incentives. And lots more. Say what you will about these reforms — maybe they’re incremental — but they’re a foundation for center-left policy in the future.”

My anxiety is reduced – thanks!

see: http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/09/why_obama_won_august_really.php

Obama’s Progressive Progress

Jacob Heilbrunn: writing in the HuffPost: “The verdict on President Obama is already in and it’s not a pretty one: he’s bungled health care. The economy is going nowhere. The Republicans are making a comeback….

By the end of this year, Obama will be in a very strong position. Congress will pass a health care bill — not a perfect one, to put it mildly, but it will be the first step toward creating comprehensive coverage. Obama will be able to claim it as a big win, as will congressional Democrats.

Then there’s the economy. Unemployment will remain high, but Obama will be able to point to a revival, not just in the stock market, but also in jobs creation. With a reviving economy, the Democrats will be in an impregnable position by the 2010 midterm elections. The Republicans who are counting on an off-year for the Democrats should think again.

What about foreign policy? Obama will have greatly curtailed the American presence in Iraq. Within a year, it will also become clear whether his approach to Afghanistan — upping the number of troops — is working. In addition, Pakistan seems to be stabilizing. Both would count as big wins for Obama.

Despite all the caterwauling about Obama, then, he remains firmly on course to become one of the most important Democratic presidents in history. It’s always tempting to demand more, to see betrayal of the cause. It’s what conservatives have been doing for decades, as they declared that even George W. Bush wasn’t conservative enough.  There is no reason to panic about Obama. His sobriety and sound judgment are his greatest assets. So far, the most significant thing about Obama isn’t that he hasn’t accomplished more, but how successful his presidency has already been.”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-heilbrunn/stop-panikcing-about-obam_b_267140.html

The Public Option is still alive!

For those feeling down about the public option, Robert Creamer, in TruthOut:

“Hasty headlines to the contrary, it is very likely that a strong public option will be part of a final health insurance reform bill when it finally passes Congress this fall. There are three reasons:

1). A Public Option is the most elegant and politically viable solution to a major practical problem.

Three basic models have been adopted by Western industrial nations to provide universal health care to their populations.

The government can directly employ doctors and hospitals to provide service

That is the system they have in Britain where they spend 40% less per person on health care than in the U.S. and get pretty good reviews from their citizens. It’s the same system that we use to provide health care to veterans through the Veterans Administration.

The government can provide heath insurance for everyone as it does in Canada – or as we do in the U.S. with Medicare. Medical practices and hospitals are in private hands, but the health insurance fund is managed by the government. Again, that system seems to work quite well and also does a good job at controlling costs.

The third approach is to require individuals and businesses to purchase insurance and leave it to private insurance companies to provide that coverage. The problem with this approach is that requires some mechanism to control costs. That is particularly true in the United States where insurance companies are one of only two industries (Major League Baseball being the other) that are excepted from the anti-trust laws that are aimed at insuring competitive markets. In fact, most major health insurance markets are dominated by two or three companies so there is no real competition – particularly with respect to price.

Once everyone is required to buy insurance, the companies can have a field day raising prices and profits using the government to guarantee they are paid – either through subsidies or the imposition of fines. You can see why, from an insurance company perspective, this would be a great deal.

But from the point of view of the taxpayers – and the insurance ratepayers – it would be a disaster. It would be like giving the insurance companies a license to take your money – with no regulation – all enforced by government edict.

This, of course, is basically what happened with the prescription drug benefit – Medicare Part D. But there is a big political difference. A huge percentage of the money used to pay the insurance and drug companies in Medicare Part D comes from the taxpayers (or deficits). Most of the money that will go to pay for health insurance in a new system will come from ratepayers – individuals and companies who will feel the sting of rate increases directly…There are only two real practical solutions to this problem. On the one hand, you could set up a public health insurance option that does not have the same incentives to increase profit or CEO salaries and would compete against the private insurance companies and keep them honest. That is what President Obama has proposed. Or you could regulate health insurance rates…

That’s why the President and his top advisors support a public option.

2). The politics of Congress and the White House. There are a couple of political givens:

• Both the White House and Democratic Leadership understand that they must pass health insurance reform. Defeat is simply not an option. Both the Carter and Clinton administrations foundered because they proposed major policy initiatives and failed to achieve them…

3). Inclusion of a public option is necessary to assure a mobilizable base to counterbalance a highly-motivated right wing and make passage of any health insurance reform possible. The public option has become an iconic symbol for Progressives. Without it, many would lose the passion that sends them to town meetings, phone banks and demonstrations. Without a public option to fuel this passion, the forces for reform would likely be overwhelmed by the shock troops of the right wing.

When you put all of these factors together, it is very likely that later this year President Obama will sign a health insurance reform bill into law that will indeed include a strong public option – not simply because the President clearly supports it, but also because of the practical policy and political considerations that make it critically necessary to success.

THANK YOU BOB!

Italics Mine.

see: http://www.truthout.org/081809R?print

Income inequity – All time high!

From Huffpost: “ Income inequality in the United States is at an all-
time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great
Depression, according to a recently updated paper by
University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel
Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points
to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American
incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the
numbers “truly amazing.”

Though income inequality has been growing for some
time, the paper paints a stark, disturbing portrait of
wealth distribution in America. Saez calculates that in
2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home
6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly
doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez
writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level
that’s “higher than any other year since 1917 and even
surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the
‘roaring” 1920s.’”Beginning in the economic expansion of the early 1990s,
Saez argues, the economy began to favor the top tiers
American earners, but much of the country missed was
left behind. “The top 1 percent incomes captured half
of the overall economic growth over the period
1993-2007,” Saes writes.

Despite a rising stock market, largely growing
employment and a historic housing boom things were not
nearly so rosy for the rest of U.S. workers. This
trend, according to Saez, only accelerated during the
George W. Bush’s tenure as President:

“…while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a
solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000,
these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from
2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of
2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of
income growth.”  (Emphasis mine)

READ the entire paper:

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2006prel.pdf

See: http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/1231c42e662ce2b1