Booman Tribune

Serious Questions

President Obama is headed for the Far East. I've never been there. If I went, I think I'd go to Cambodia, Vietnam, and the beaches in Thailand. Have you been? Where would you go?

Silly Ezra

I don't know the internal politics at the Washington Post, so I don't know if Ezra Klein will pay any price for contradicting Fred Hiatt. But I do know that Ezra is kind of silly to attempt to take Hiatt's idiotic arguments in good faith.

HCR is Getting Dicey

It's encouraging that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs threatened to use the budget reconciliation process if the health care bill stalls in the Senate. Other than a brief burst of optimism I had after Senator Paul Kirk was seated as Kennedy's replacement, I have never believed that Obama could pass a public option through the Senate. The only chance I could see for doing that was to first pass a bill through the Senate that didn't have a public option. This would allow Harry Reid to pass all the procedural hurdles up to the point that the Senate had to vote on the Conference Report. At that point, with both Houses having passed a health care reform bill, we'd be waiting for the historic vote on final passage. There would be the maximum possible amount of pressure on Democratic senators not to kill all the hard work made up to that point by denying the Majority Leader a procedural vote to bring the bill up. If a public option was going to survive, it needed to be introduced only at this final point in the process. That wouldn't guarantee passage, but it would provide us with the best chance. And, if some lonely senator like Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson decided to take the heat and kill reform at that point, it would be relatively easy to make the case for using the budget reconciliation process rather than let one or two insurance whores in the caucus stand in the way of historic reform. Harry Reid decided to go in another direction. He decided to make the public option part of the base bill. As soon as he did that, it killed off all the momentum for a robust public option in the House. The leadership asked the Progressives to prove that they had the votes for it, and they couldn't. It didn't seem to matter too much because the robust public option was never going to pass the Senate anyway. It was, as Pelosi stated repeatedly, a chip to use in the Conference Committee. She wanted a robust public option in hand because she always assumed that the Senate version would lack any public option at all. The idea was that each side would compromise, and the end result would be a public option that was not tied to Medicare reimbursement rates. But, when Reid put exactly that type of public option in the base bill, there was no longer any need for the House to pass the stronger version. It was easier to give nervous centrists a break and only ask them to vote for a non-robust public option that more nearly resembled the Senate version. It shouldn't make much difference in the end. The House and Senate would still wind up in the same place, they'd just start out with less of a divide. But, of course, things didn't turn out exactly that way. Pelosi didn't gain extra votes once she dropped her push for a robust public option. Instead, the House conservadems got greedy and insisted on adding the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Even then, Pelosi saw no spike in centrist support. She passed the bill with a mere two more votes than she needed, and one of those votes was from a Republican. It's encouraging that Obama has announced that he finds the Stupak-Pitts language unacceptable, but it's not clear that he can strip it out without losing the support of three congresspeople. Meanwhile, Reid's gambit appears to be failing, as he can't line up 60 votes for the base bill. Unless something changes, Reid will be forced to withdraw his bill and reintroduce one that has no public option. Failing that, he could give up and go straight to the budget reconciliation process. But, unlike the scenario I crafted, where the blame for failing to pass something with a public option would come at the very end of the process and fall on Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson, in this scenario the failure would come prior to the Conference Committee and fall solely on Reid for miscalculating and failing to lead his caucus. Far from demonstrating overwhelming support for the public option, he would have demonstrated that it was a non-starter in the Senate. Meanwhile, the House barely passed a bill that had ridiculous abortion restrictions and a non-robust public option. How could they be expected to turn around and pass a bill in reconciliation that is much stronger? I know that the people pushing for a public option in the base Senate bill meant well, and they have convinced themselves that only through their efforts has a public option survived at all. But it is not that simple. The Progressives were pledged to vote against any bill that doesn't have a robust public option, but they showed the emptiness of that threat when they couldn't muster the votes to pass one and they backed down. Reid was pressured into introducing the public option prematurely, over the doubts of the White House, and now he's left holding the bag. Procedure is complicated and infuriating. But making the wrong calls on procedural moves has now imperiled the passage on any health care reform whatsoever, whether done under reconciliation or not.

Bill Clinton to Give Senate Pep Talk

TPMDC reports that the Senate Democratic Caucus is having lunch with former president Bill Clinton today to discuss health care reform. It could be like asking Bob Shrum to run your presidential campaign, or it could be a valuable wake-up call of what it's like to lose power in Congress a mere two years into a new Democratic president's term. An interesting feature of the debate is that the most reluctant members of the Dem Caucus have a lot to lose if the Republicans regain power. Mary Landrieu would probably have to hand her gavel on the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship over to Diaper Dave Vitter. I know that would be a bitter pill. Blanche Lincoln just won the chairmanship of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Saxby Chambliss would take over for her. Kent Conrad chairs the Committee on the Budget. I wonder how he'd like to take orders from Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Joe Lieberman cherishes his chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Of the most likely hold-outs, only Ben Nelson doesn't stand to lose a full committee chair if the Republicans make a comeback. But, even if they retain their chairs, their power will be diminished if the Dems lose seats. They'll never achieve cloture without winning over Republicans. And, a Republican House would cause them all kinds of nightmares. It's still unlikely that the Republicans can regain either house in just one election cycle, but you never know. Why risk it? President Clinton had two years to make sweeping progress. He spent the next six years playing defense. I hope he can convince wavering Democrats that they don't want to repeat that history.

Not the Worst GOP Scandal Ever

This story about prominent Idaho political figure and Republican National Committee member Blake Hall and his conviction for stalking his former girlfriend is pretty disturbing, nonetheless, especially from the "ewww!" factor alone: Blake Hall, a leading figure in Idaho and national politics for 25 years, was fired Monday as a deputy prosecuting attorney in eastern Idaho and has resigned from the Republican National Committee. [...] Idaho Falls police reported that witnesses said Hall disposed of used condoms on the lawn of the woman's house. Nineteen condoms were turned over to police, collected on 10 different dates, according to a police report. Both Hall and his lawyer acknowledged the condoms belonged to him, according to a police report. [...] "I was so tired of being victimized," the woman said. "It is unimaginable that a 56-year-old would be so deviant." Well, at least he didn't try to choke her to death. And it's clear from his behavior he hasn't been seduced by the Gay Side, so far as we know. In Republican Political circles I guess that makes him a stand up guy. Which is why, even though he has to serve a six month 15 day jail term, resign from the RNC, and was fired from one of the government jobs he held, he still gets to keep his second government job as a civil attorney for Fremont County, Idaho: But Hall, 56, will keep his $31,000-a-year job as the civil attorney in nearby Fremont County, according to Prosecutor Joette Lookabaugh, a Republican who hired Hall in January. Lookabaugh said she told Hall he would keep his job "unless or until his ability to do an outstanding job for Fremont County citizens is compromised." [...] "I understand that political figures are held to a higher standard," she said. "What is disturbing is the fact that often people who have devoted their lives to public service are not given the same benefits, or are treated more harshly, than the public at large. There seems to be a certain amount of political glee in striking down the well-known for any real or perceived foible." This behavior by Mr. Hall was only a "real or perceived foible? I guess a conviction and jail time for stalking a married woman who repeatedly asked him to stop harassing her and leaving used condoms on her lawn is only a "foible" if you're a Republican. As opposed to a blow job given to a Democratic president which was, after all, an impeachable offense committed by a man who nearly destroyed this great nation of ours, and was, without a doubt, the worst, most immoral thing ever done by a White Male President.* Still, he's not really that bad of a guy. By all accounts (i.e., his attorney's statement), he took his punishment like a real man, with grace and dignity, but most of all with great strength: David Leroy, a former Idaho attorney general, is Hall's attorney. "In my opinion, he accepted this severe penalty with extreme grace," Leroy said Monday. "He was calm and strong." I think this qualifies him to run for Vice president, don't you? Clearly, he'd make a great running mate for Sarah Palin in 2012. I mean, he's a bit of a rogue, too, and he comes from Real America, which would make their ticket a match made in Republican Heaven. What more could she ask for? * Trying to pass a health care reform bill is undeniably the worst thing any President has ever done, especially when you are the country's first African American President and a well known Marxist, Socialist, Fascist baby killer, the second coming of Adolph Hitler, and a terrorist sympathizer who'd rather appease Muslims than save American lives, too.

Open Thread

It's like Michael Steele thinks the white people can't hear him because he's on black radio. No word on whether he brought his fried chicken and potato salad.

Violating People's Grief

One thing gets lost when we focus only on the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. And that is that pregnancies terminate themselves all the time. And, when they do, there is frequently a problem that the remnants of that pregnancy do not expel themselves fully or adequately. I'm not going to get all medical on you, but the process for cleaning out a woman's uterus after her fetus dies is not necessarily any different from the procedure used to perform an abortion. In fact, if a D&C is preformed, it is often termed an abortion, even though it is not. And this is where privacy can really become a major issue. If abortion were illegal, all these D&C's would become potential crime scenes. But, under the language of the Stupak Amendment, the same would be true. In the former case, we might be talking about a murder investigation. In the latter, it's a matter of potential insurance fraud. I won't discuss my personal history with these issues out of respect for other's privacy, except to say that I have experienced miscarriage. It is heartbreaking and traumatic. And, the idea that my partner and I might be put in the position of having to explain how our pregnancy was lost spontaneously to an insurance agent, or a prosecutor, is something too horrible to really put into words. How do I prove that the heart just stopped beating? Imagine having to make sure your doctor would certify that your wife had extreme hypertension, or some other life-threatening problem? Imagine having to prove that your pregnancy resulted from rape, or whether or not to turn your incestuous uncle in to the authorities so you could get your insurance money. When the Supreme Court ruled that abortion should be completely legal in the first trimester, they were taking these practical privacy issues into consideration. The loss of a pregnancy, for any reason, is a deeply personal trauma. Nothing could be more psychologically harmful than casting legal doubt over every pregnancy that ends short of term. It is the violation of private grief, more than anything else, that would make a repeal of Roe v. Wade so deeply unpopular. But exposing grieving would-be parents to this type of abuse through restrictions in the provision of health insurance would create the same reaction. You cannot restrict or regulate abortion in this way without creating all kinds of collateral damage among people who didn't have an abortion in the first place. Sometimes we lose sight of this in our desire to argue from first principles. But it's actually a point that I've made to many anti-choice people, and I've never failed to make them think twice about their lazy assumptions.

The Threat of Governing from This Center

The problem of not having a rational alternative party to the Democrats became obvious in the New Jersey gubernatorial race. In July, the FBI, in a widespread money laundering and corruption investigation, arrested dozens of people in New Jersey, including (mostly) Democratic politicians. The incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, was already unpopular, but this called for some serious repudiation of his party by the voters. The problem? His opponent was one of Karl Rove's corrupt U.S. Attorneys. What kind of choice is that? How do you tell the Democrats in the Garden State to clean up their act by electing a guy who subverted the integrity of the Department of Justice? We'd all like to vote on the issues, but sometimes you just have throw the bums out, even when they're on your side of the issues. You can't do that, though, when the alternative is plum-crazy. And that is basically what Paul Krugman is saying in his column today. Looking at the mainstreaming of the teabagging movement by the Republican establishment, Krugman notes, "What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit." The GOP used to be run by sober people like James Baker. Today, it doesn't appear to be run by anyone. Baker was bad enough, but you knew that he wasn't going to start enacting Pat Robertson's pet agenda, or amplify the party base's paranoid conspiracy theories. Candidate recruitment for the GOP is in the hands of two utterly nutty Texans (Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Kevin McCarthy Rep. Pete Sessions). Update [2009-11-9 12:51:39 by BooMan]: Brain fart alert. McCarthy is doing candidate recruitment for Sessions, but he's a Californian. But they are coming under relentless criticism from their right for attempting to attract candidates that suit their states and districts. It may prove impossible for Cornyn and McCarthy to clear the field for their recruits. Many of them may lose contested primaries because the party's base is now whittled down to a lunatic fringe. But far from discouraging this insurrection in their ranks, the Republicans are trying to benefit from its energy and financial power. That's why they held a teabagging event on the Capitol Steps last week, and that is why they now have to explain their decision to consort with people who think health care reform is akin to National Socialism. The Democrats are toying with some of the same problems, but for a different reason. Read this bit from Krugman, but replace 'right-wing' with 'left-wing.' When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right. Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. There is an angry, fringe-left in this country, but the progressive base of the Democratic Party is not fringe. At least, we're not fringe if you poll the American people on what they want to see in domestic and foreign policy. But, we are feeling a bit dispossessed at the moment because we're seeing policy get crafted to appeal to the most conservative elements of the Democratic Party. Part of this is just a concession to the make-up and rules of the Senate, which make the Senate more conservative than the nation as a whole, and allow any Democrat to exercise veto power over policy. But, most progressives don't concern themselves with such details. All they know is that they're getting treated the same way the right-wing base has been treated by the economic elites for decades. We don't have anywhere to go. We're certainly not interested in seeing a bunch of teabaggers get elected. But a captive vote is not an energized vote. The Republicans have sold their base an incoherent set of ideas about the evils of the federal government. Once they controlled the federal government, they broke every promise because they weren't willing to devolve all federal authority to the states. They'd do the same thing again, if they retook power in Washington. The Democrats, on the other hand, have sold their base a bunch of promises about checking excessive executive power, rolling back our foreign military commitments, protecting a woman's right to chooise, and creating a universal health care system with a public option. A failure to produce on those promises threatens to make the Democratic Base lose faith. It doesn't look to me like the center will hold. Either the Democrats snap out of their funk and lead this country to the left, or the anti-incumbent mood will bring teabaggers to power and we'll have real problems like we haven't seen since the Civil War rent this country in two. I know it is self-serving and convenient for a progressive to argue for more progressive policies, but we're in real jeopardy here if the Democrats can't overcome this gridlock, and if they don't get serious about keeping their promises. I'm not talking about some lurch to the far left here. I'm talking about doing what you campaigned on.

This Will Now Get Very Big

ABC News reports: U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News. It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said. One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan's efforts. CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress "to preserve" all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker. On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist. This information is a bit hazy at the moment. We could be talking about another example of the intelligence community getting burned because they refuse to share information, or because they collect information without warrants, or because they misdiagnosed the threat this man posed and didn't move from investigation to some kind of disciplinary or legal action. The hardest thing in the world is to tell a victim's family that you knew this guy was sympathizing with al-Qaeda and you let him continue in his job as an Army psychiatrist. But even though ABC News is a reputable source most of the time, I want to see a statement from the administration before I believe this report is 100% accurate.

A Small Slice of Conservative Sanity

For years I've wondered why climate change became a political issue, with conservatives jumping on the denialist propaganda offered up with gusto by the fossil fuel industry funded disinformation campaign. One conclusion I've been able to get my hands around is that many, many conservatives are also conservative Christians with a deeply antithetical stance toward science and the work of scientists. And these Christians are predisposed to oppose scientific inquiry. Not that this is new. The tension between Christianity and science has long existed because science relies on objective proof, whereas religion relies on faith in traditional doctrines, interpretations of the Bible and revelation. The Church famously denied the theory of Copernicus and prosecuted Galileo when he argued in its favor. Darwin has been and continues to be a curse word for fundamentalist believers, even though the theory of evolution has been the bulwark of many of the advances in biology and medicine over the last 150 years. Of course, not all scientific research has been condemned by Conservative Christians. Believe it or not, many Christian Organizations, including Baptists, were at the forefront of campaigns to expose the health risks of smoking cigarettes in the 20th Century. So why have they been so reluctant to assume that the science of global warming is a hoax, a pile of lies concocted by Al Gore and his evil minions? I think a lot of it has to do with where they go to get their information about the science of climate change. Conservative talk radio. Fox News. Media outlets with deep ties to the Republican Party and Big Business, which have their own financial interest in muddying the waters on what should be a non-controversial issue. Which is where the subject of my title finally makes its long awaited appearance. You see, at least one Conservative Christian husband and wife team, he a fundamentalist preacher and she a climate scientist have written a book together to try to convince their Conservative Christian brethren that yes, climate change is real, and yes, we, as human beings, really are the culprits behind global warming and the many dangers it poses to our future: As an evangelical Christian living in Texas, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe found that many conservatives had questions about climate change based on things they'd heard on talk radio. So Hayhoe and her husband, Andrew Farley, the pastor of a nondenominational church in Lubbock, Texas, decided to answer the questions in a new book from religious publisher FaithWords, "A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-based Decisions." "The observed increase in greenhouse gas levels, due to human production, is the only explanation we can find to account for what has happened to our world," Farley and Hayhoe wrote. "We've dusted for fingerprints. There's only one likely suspect remaining. It's us." [...] Hayhoe teaches in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University, and she was a lead author of a U.S. government report on climate change in the United States that was released in June. She also was one of some 2,000 scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 that there was unequivocal evidence of warming. Farley, a conservative Republican, is the pastor of Ecclesia, a nondenominational Christian church, and teaches linguistics at Texas Tech. "To get information on climate change, you have to go to the people who know the information. That's why we wrote this together as a climate scientist and a pastor," Hayhoe said. "He asked the tough questions. He said you've got to talk about this and this and this, and these answers have to satisfy me." Many of the questions were from the arguments of conservative celebrities. I welcome anyone who attempts to cut through the dirty haze of the conservative media's disinformation campaign, especially people who are Conservatives and are Fundamentalist Christians. More than any other problem which confronts humanity, this is one in which the traditional divisions between liberal and conservative, left and right, religious faith and scientific research, should not exist. So I salute Professor Tahoe and her husband Pastor Farley for making the effort to reach out to their fellow believers with the truth about climate change and why it is occurring. The sad irony is that they likely will be condemned by many Conservative Christians for "drinking the liberal Kool-Aid" on global warming because so many right wing believers would rather put their trust in liars and hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who act as well paid shills for the disinformation campaign of Big Oil, Big Coal, and other industries with a vested interest in the use of fossil fuels, than in dedicated scientists who share their faith, like Professor Tahoe.

Froggy Bottom Cafe

Something Less Annoying

Have you seen Al Franken draw the United States from memory? That performance has inspired a contest: It's good to see a little uplifting, humorous news from Alaska's Senate delegation. According to Politico's "Click," in an effort to encourage American students to pay more attention to geography, National Geographic magazine sent out letters to the members of the U.S. Senate asking them to draw a map of their home state "from memory," indicate three places on the map that are significant to them, and briefly tell why. The challenge is based on Sen. Al Franken's (D-Minn.) famous ability to draw the Lower 48's coastline from memory. One Senator from Oregon seemed to relish the fact that Sen. Mark Begich has a tough job ahead, and joshed that the Senate is eagerly waiting to see if he can draw all the Aleutian Islands accurately. Begich's office retorted that National Geographic's new, educational video game, "The Alcan Trail" will soon surpass the popularity of the classic game "The Oregon Trail." It will be tough for Mark Udall and Michael Bennet.

What If...

Can you imagine what would have happened to Howard Dean if he had tried to pull this when he was chairman of the DNC? Last week, Republican National Committee Michael Steele warned GOP members of Congress that they will face tough consequences if they vote in favor of the health care bill. "So candidates who live in moderate to slightly liberal districts have got to walk a little bit carefully here, because you do not want to put yourself in a position where you're crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we'll come after you," Steele told ABC News.

HCR is Still a Toss-Up

The way Joe Lieberman is talking, he's not leaving himself any room to support the Senate bill if it includes a public option. He's locking himself in as an opponent. WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you�re a �no� vote in the Senate? LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that�s worse than the one we�re fighting our way out of today. I don�t want to do that to our children and grandchildren. Never mind that it is the provision of a public option that makes the Senate bill save more money in the budget than it costs. If Lieberman doesn't change his mind, and Olympia Snowe doesn't change her mind, then there will be no public option. In fact, the Senate bill simply won't pass. Reid will have to withdraw the bill and introduce Snowe's trigger as the base bill, or he will have to give up entirely and go to reconciliation. But I am not sure anymore that the House can pass a bill in reconciliation. I am not sure that they can pass a bill with a trigger, either. It's still a toss-up whether health care reform can actually pass in any form.

Hasan Was Al Qaeda Terrorist!

Major Nidal Hasan was part of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell with the 9/11 hijackers. I know, I know, that's not what the liberal mainstream media and Obama lackeys are claiming, but fotunately for us right wing bloggers are on the case, and they have definitive proof that Hasan was part of an Al Qaeda plot. Or he could have been. Or maybe he ran into some of the hijackers there. It could have happened. But that's beside the point. See, now we have solid evidence of the Obama -> Hasan -> Al Qaeda connection to destroy America, one military base massacre at a time. Well, that and murder by health care reform. Let's not forget about that. And anyone who believes otherwise is a probably a liberal, global warming ecoterrorist, Marxist, Socialist Nazi Obama worshiper who should be taken out and shot by loyal patriots of Real America. Oh, and ... WOLVERINES!!!!!!