Fake health reform opponents, meet real health reform opponents. It’s hard to decide which is funnier.

It’s pretty clear that despite Frank Luntz’s best efforts, conservatives aren’t getting the talking points. Watch tea party goers in New York talk about how great our health care system is, then readily admit the Republicans have no plan for health care, either. This is priceless:

“There has been no clear consensus on what constitutes torture,” according to Brian Duffy, NPR’s former managing editor, a principal in Public Radio’s refusal to use the term “torture” to describe Bush era practices.

“I understand the desire to ‘call a spade a spade,’ but it is not for journalists to start labeling specific practices torture,” said Duffy. “That’s what the debate is about — what constitutes torture?”

National Public Radio’s Ombudsman Alicia Shepherd concurs,

“The role of a news organization is not to choose sides in this or any debate. People have different definitions of torture and different feelings about what constitutes torture. NPR’s job is to give listeners all perspectives, and present the news as detailed as possible and put it in context.”

Ombudsman Shepherd continues, “No matter how many distinguished groups — the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners — say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation’s security.

One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public. So, it is not an open-and-shut case that everyone believes waterboarding to be torture.

I am not shilling for NPR. I don’t agree with its use of bureaucratic euphemisms like ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’  But I am shilling for strong, credible journalism that is as objective as humanly possible.”

Hmm, is an Ombudsman just a paid blog commenter?

Bob Garfield, host of the NPR program, “On The Media,” conducted an exemplary interview with NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepherd.

He queried,

“Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

It seems to me that the only people who think it’s a debate are the Bush Administration, who are the culprits. So how does that constituent a debate?

NPR certainly has no difficulty calling murder ‘murder.’ It doesn’t call it ‘enhanced argumentation technique.’ The terrorists call themselves ‘freedom fighters’ but NPR calls acts of terror ‘acts of terror.’”

Jesus upbraided his disciples for using weasel words to avoid telling the truth.  His punch line was,

“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

Karen J. Greenberg writes in her sobering op-ed “Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye,”

“Bush’s Global War on Terror has been a textbook case of human rights violations designed and implemented at the highest levels of government. First, there was the assault on the English language, a necessary initial step in the process of changing the national mindset of a country about to become a first-class human-rights abuser… (when) Susan Sontag compared administration abuses of language to the linguistic perversions that preceded genocidal acts against the Hutus in Rwanda, I recoiled.”

Ever since Gingrich’s “Contract on America” began to threaten NPR’s government funding the network has become morally docile as a legitimate political watchdog.

After 9-11 as NPR garnered a much larger “market share” their support has become much more corporate and their coverage much more feel good.

Public Radio does non threatening arts and culture pieces very well, and will do liberal self congratulatory stories about racism, sexism, or homophobia.

However, NPR’s political interviews are so polite and cozy as to be just shy of handing government officials an open mic to spew propaganda.  Grade school kids have recently asked former Bushies like Condoleezza Rice tougher questions than any NPR reporter ever has.  BBC training and an internship on “Democracy Now” should be mandatory for every NPR correspondent.

It gives me no pleasure to say this but what I  have privately railed about for years is  dreadfully clear now.  NPR has ceded its moral integrity and sacred journalistic trust to hold the powerful accountable.

Health care is worthy of a vigorous debate.  International, universally accepted definitions of torture are not.

There are times when the admonishment of Jesus cannot be trifled with. “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

Paul Krugman gets it:

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.

…

Now, about those specifics: The HELP plan achieves near-universal coverage through a combination of regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies would be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history; on the other side, everyone except the poor and near-poor would be obliged to buy insurance, with the aid of subsidies that would limit premiums as a share of income.

Employers would also have to chip in, with all firms employing more than 25 people required to offer their workers insurance or pay a penalty. By the way, the absence of such an “employer mandate” was the big problem with the earlier, incomplete version of the plan.

And those who prefer not to buy insurance from the private sector would be able to choose a public plan instead. This would, among other things, bring some real competition to the health insurance market, which is currently a collection of local monopolies and cartels.

The budget office says that all this would cost $597 billion over the next decade. But that doesn’t include the cost of insuring the poor and near-poor, whom HELP suggests covering via an expansion of Medicaid (which is outside the committee’s jurisdiction). Add in the cost of this expansion, and we’re probably looking at between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion.

There are a number of ways to look at this number, but maybe the best is to point out that it’s less than 4 percent of the $33 trillion the U.S. government predicts we’ll spend on health care over the next decade. And that in turn means that much of the expense can be offset with straightforward cost-saving measures, like ending Medicare overpayments to private health insurers and reining in spending on medical procedures with no demonstrated health benefits.

The verdict is clear - if we do reform right, it doesn’t cost much, and the benefits, both economically and socially, are enormous. People get coverage, costs go down, and medical bankruptcies stop.

But this only works if you’ve got all the elements. A public option, shared responsibility where employer contribute, decent benefits, and subsidies to make it affordable. If you’re missing those elements, the costs go up, and on top of that, you don’t get real reform that meaningfully affects everyday Americans.

Will the Finance Committee follow suit here? If Chuck Schumer has anything to say about it, yes:

“If you did a consensus within the Democratic Party, you would find the level-playing-field public option to be the answer,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “And now that we have 60 votes, it seems to me like we don’t have to turn it inside out for something we don’t like.”

…

“[Sen. Chuck] Grassley hasn’t closed the door, but it seems in general that his model of co-op is little co-ops popping up like they do in farm country,” he said. “And the model that we are saying we need is they have to be strong, national and available everywhere from the first day. And I think we are very far apart on this.”

“So I don’t think the co-op way can work,” Schumer added. “So let’s go back and do what we should be doing: a public option.”

And they should. It’s better for the country, it’s better for consumers, and it’s better for America’s bank account. Just about the only people who don’t like it are ideological conservatives, and they just lost the election.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

As major Arab and African opposition to the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir emerges, the wisdom of the indictment - and the Court’s power to enforce it - have been called into serious question.

At its recent summit in Libya, the African Union announced that it will not cooperate with the ICC to arrest al-Bashir. This move represents an escalation from a previous request by the AU to the UN Security Council to postpone the indictment. It also brings the AU’s position into line with that of the Arab League, which rejected the ICC decision at its summit in Qatar earlier this spring.

Not all African countries approve of the AU’s stance; Botswana, for example, has reiterated its support for the ICC’s indictment, as has Chad. From AU and Arab League statements, however, it’s clear that strong opposition to al-Bashir’s arrest exists from Capetown to Damascus, with echoes in Beijing. Spoken opposition - and its manifestation in (lack of) deeds as al-Bashir travels abroad unimpeded, undermines the ICC’s authority.

That the rest of the world is able to do something that the U.S. can’t seems an odd principle for the entrepreneurship advocates to espouse. While holding that regulation destroys innovation, our wingers claim that we are going to give up our advantages by providing health care to everyone. Regulation of our health care system is the danger they predict; freedom to be sick doesn’t seem like much of an argument, but it’s the best they’ve got.

Dr. Krugman has already pointed out that this country spent its way into the present crisis with tax breaks for business that did not produce the employment they were claimed to. Today, he provides some specifics of the health plan proposed for the U.S. public.

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.

And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.

Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of “uncompensated” care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.

Putting these observations together, what sounds at first like a daunting prospect — extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance — should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill. And that’s exactly what the budget office found when scoring the HELP proposal.

The wingers appear to have nothing but opposition to public interest as a basis for existence. It’s not surprising that their arguments are creative,but lack substance, as they are not the true story.

The right wing is against the left, and that is its attraction. Unreasoning obstruction isn’t a tactic, it’s the character of the movement. Sadly, there is still a faction of the voting public that identifies with mindless opposition to anything progressive and in the public interest.

Hopefully, the wingnuts can be cured by rational behavior over time.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Less than five months ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued that the Republican party had gotten away from its supposed core principles: “limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility.”  He promised, “on behalf of our leaders in Congress and [his] fellow Republican governors” that “our party is determined to regain your trust.”

How’s that been working out?  There are just 22 Republican governors nationwide: in the past two weeks, two of those 22, Sanford and Palin, demonstrated an utter failure of personal responsibility (in very different ways, of course–Palin didn’t have an affair, she merely walked away from the oath she swore when taking office as governor).  Senator Ensign, who held a top leadership post in the Republican caucus, also recently demonstrated his failings on the personal responsibility front.  All three were considered possible presidential contenders in 2012 (Bill Kristol is performing rhetorical gymnastics in an effort to argue that Palin is somehow still in the mix and Palin’s photo is still prominently featured on the Republican Governors Association website atop the declaration that “the GOP comeback begins now”).

So far, Jindal’s pledge on behalf of his fellow Republicans doesn’t seem to be working out very well.  In less than five months, Jindal’s fellow Republican governors are failing the personal responsibility test at nearly a 10% rate.  A top Senate leader has failed as well.  Does the party get another do-over?

The truth is that Republican slogans about their devotion to limited government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility have been empty claims for the past 30 years.  Republican presidents left Democrats huge deficits.  The only time we have seen a balanced budget in recent years was under a Democratic president.  Republican claims of limited government were undermined by the party’s position on abortion and LGBT rights, as well as the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance, torture of detainees and other excesses of executive power (some of which, unfortunately, are being continued by Obama).  Recent events make clear that Republicans have no monopoly on personal responsibility (as we learned from past trespasses as well e.g. the Gingrich, Livingston, Foley, Craig, and Vitter episodes, to name a few).

I don’t think this is a good thing.  A credible opposition party is something I’d like to see, as it would put positive pressure on Democrats to craft better policies.  The current Republican party doesn’t fit the bill.

Most of you immediately recognized the abbreviation for Too Much Information, TMI, so welcome aboard. The episodes of normally functional, if not impressive, public figures putting up incredibly dumb communications on Twitter, Facebook and the like are pretty funny as those publicity users try to adjust to a whole new world.

The communication that made it possible for everyday citizens of Iran to maintain some hold on their government has given us all sorts of possibilities for direct lines among us people. Where media has dominated for much of our lives, at least attempting to portray itself as the real source for knowledge, that imaginary role has failed increasingly as the newspapers sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Suddenly the office seekers are finding out they can’t establish a few trusted reporters to deliver their message to, and expect us to suck it in. Now they need to communicate. The results are enchanting. Who would have thunk it was important to him, not what he concluded about the peccadilloes of his party, but what Newt had for dinner. Twittering about hearing voices is a new way to claim sacred communication status among those who are so inclined.

A new standard for chatter is desperately being sought by the ‘personalities’ who thought they had their images covered. How diverting for staff, to try making a new sort of person up, some one sympathetic to keen observers and casual browsers at the same time. However, the field of online communications has real dangers for security personnel.

For the secret services in England, the communications of its operatives are suddenly making problematic their official security measures. His wife’s online persona suddenly is a problem for having a casual social presence with friends that wasn’t protected from sharing at large.

Personal details about the life of the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, have been removed from social networking site Facebook amid security concerns.

The Mail on Sunday said his wife had put details about their children and the location of their flat on the site.

The details were removed after the paper contacted the Foreign Office.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband denied claims security had been compromised, saying: “You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit. That’s not a state secret.”
(snip)
Former Prime Minister Sir John Major said the issue had been “overblown”.

He said: “I know John Sawers. He’s a very able man, he’s a very able appointment. It’s pretty unfortunate that this has happened, I think that is true.

“But I think when you’re faced with leaving Iraq possibly too early, huge problems in Afghanistan, the mess in Pakistan, the depth of the recession, I think this falls a long way below those.”

Sir John Sawers is due to replace Sir John Scarlett as head of the overseas Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

While most of the people I chat with are pretty well known to me, and their secrets are just that, all of us know that trolls like to wriggle in and try to find tidbits to make a hullabaloo about. One likes to accuse members of our circle of being twisted in some way, or having a seamy side that they alone have recognized.

What sort of motivation the nuisances operate from is a sad sidelight to the substantial support most of us find in online communications. What would be the national threat to anyone who carries on normal communications that may reveal security concerns is yet another wrinkle in the possibilities of our chatter. Your swimwear look isn’t going to tear down anyone’s marriage, most probably, but your address may make you vulnerable.

Online most of us have a rich and satisfactory circle of friends, associates, and like-minded social contacts. It’s probably not a possibility for all of us, though, and the public exposure has to be obvious from the start.

In a public position, especially one that deals with security issues, there will have to be limits of exposure. Sadly, it appears that online life will have to stay virtual for anyone in a sensitive position.

In the groupings where I have conversations, we tend to let each other know when one of us is taking chances with some one who’s been untrustworthy in the past.
All of us have learned to wait and let any new member establish a persona that we recognize for basic consideration and reputable practices. Hopefully, this kind of protective attitude can be adopted by those in the field of security to those it needs to protect.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

How are you celebrating our nation’s birth? I’m watching stuff explode!

Reading a troll comment at another blog about the libruls being parasitical on the country really brought me up sharp. With almost a decade of wingnuts sucking the blood of the working people of this country, it takes amazing incomprehension of reality to arrive at the concept that the progressives are taking something away from the society.

By reducing taxes on the business segment, jobs were supposed to be produced, and the economy made more prosperous. Jobs going overseas in manufacturing was supposed to be replaced by high-tech jobs, and U.S. workers all rising into a higher pay scale and better conditions. As we know by observation, quite the reverse has been true. Yet no attempt to counteract that effect has been made, and the U.S. worker, and economy, have come to disastrous loss of earning power.

Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on this recently that bears a bit of attention from us all.

It’s always well to keep in mind a astute observation by Adam Smith about policy formation in England. He recognized that what he called the “principal architects” of policy—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers—make sure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to, however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England, but far more so those who were subjected to what he called the “savage injustice of the Europeans,” and particularly in conquered India, his own prime concern. We can easily think of analogs today. His observation, in fact, is one of the few solid and enduring principles of international and domestic affairs well to keep in mind.
(snip)
Along with the fact that bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation, not forgetting the tens of millions enduring hunger in the richest country in the world, well, also sidelined is an easy way to make a significant dent in the financial and the food crises. It’s suggested by the publication a couple days ago of the authoritative annual report on military spending by SIPRI, the Swedish peace research institute, the scale of military spending is phenomenal, regularly increasing, this last year as well. Now, the US is responsible for almost as much as the rest of the world combined, seven times as much as its nearest rival, China. No need to waste time commenting.

This distribution of concerns reflects another crisis here, kind of a cultural crisis, that is the tendency to focus on short-term parochial games. That’s a core element of our socioeconomic institutions and the ideological support system on which they rest. One example, now prominent, is the array of perverse incentives that are devised for corporate managers to enrich themselves. And, for example, what’s called the “too big too fail” insurance policies that are provided by the unwitting public. And deeper ones. They’re just inherent in market inefficiencies.
(snip)
Well, in substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have common roots, namely the shift towards neoliberalism since the 1970s. That brought to an end the postwar, post-Second World War, Bretton Woods system that was instituted by the United States and Britain right after World War II. It had two architects: John Maynard Keynes of Britain and Harry Dexter White in the United States. And they anticipated that its core principles, which included capital controls and regulated currencies—they anticipated that these principles would lead to relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs, welfare state programs, that had enormous public support around the world.

And to a large extent, they were vindicated on both counts. In fact, many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “Golden Age of Capitalism.” That Golden Age led not only to unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare state measures. Keynes and White were perfectly well aware that free capital movement and speculation inhibit these options. Professional economics literature points out what should be obvious, that the free flow of capital creates what is sometimes called a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a moment-by-moment referendum on government policies, and if they find that they’re irrational, meaning they help people instead of profits, then they vote against them, by capital flight, by tax on the country, and so on. So the democratic governments have a dual constituency, their own population and the virtual senate, who typically prevail. And for the poor, that means regular disaster. (Emphasis added.)

That short term profits, at corporations, have been substituted for development of long-term profitability has resulted in executives directing all profit to themselves - rather than profits for the firm, with its many employees and shareholders.

The controls that the past maladministration removed were keeping the economy from tanking, and by removing them the right wing has preyed on us all. The parasitical aim of the right wing is to keep the worker from profiting from the labor that we put out, and take as much away as we can stand. Of course, they’re exceeded the limits and produced a worldwide economic crisis.

It will take a long time to recover and it will take the release of control - or taking away of control from those moneyed interests. Without control of the business community, they destroy themselves. We’ve learned the lesson again.

The wealth of a society cannot be taken away from the members of that society without destroying it.

Celebrate Independence Day.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

The recent presidential election turmoil in Iran, regardless of the ‘truth’ behind the events, will undoubtedly have serious ramifications for the Islamic Republic on several fronts.

Chief among these is an inevitable blow to the Islamic Regime’s legitimacy, and its regional and global standing in the eyes of Iranians, the region’s population, and the world at large.

Within Iran, it is clear that a major rift among the population has manifested itself both on the streets and within the political and religious elite. On the one hand, millions of Iranian women and men have confirmed their frustration with the Regime and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s presidency through street demonstrations and direct action.

On the other, the handpicked candidates who were actually allowed the privilege of participating in the presidential elections by the ‘Supreme Leader’ together with their more powerful backers behind the scenes have turned on each other in a surprisingly public and vitriolic manner.

What began as a positive and welcome show of openness in televised live debates among the candidates quickly turned into allegations of election fraud by the losing side almost as soon as the polls closed. This was swiftly followed by a fierce crackdown against public dissent – ironically, just over a week after the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square.