Like most good Republicans, this was only Rep. King's first explanation.  He later changed fields, claiming the slave labor resolution was off base because it didn't present a "balanced depiction of history."  I don't really know what to make of that, other than suggesting King might seek a career in journalism working for one of the media outlets that worships at the altar of balance (this is an approach that would, in a different context, give equal time to those who believe global warming is mainly caused by human activity and those who believe the earth is 6,000 years old and global warming is a hoax).  But even taking King at his word, his assertion makes no sense.  

Perhaps King doesn't realize it, but the Capitol already provides the "balanced" view of history he may be seeking--in fact, the scales are tipped a bit toward those who defended slavery.  If Rep. King ever walks through the National Statutory Hall Collection in the Capitol he should check out the statute of Alexander Stephens.   Stephens was Vice President of the Confederacy and declared that his country's government was founded on the "cornerstone...that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."  Stephens isn't alone in the hall--he is joined by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun, an ardent defender of slavery before the Civil War.

I don't know if this satisfies King's "balance" standard, but in my view, if there are statues honoring men who defended slavery, men who seceded from the United States and fought a war to defend slavery, it might help balance things out a little to acknowledge the slaves who helped build the edifice that now houses those mens' statues.

In addition, I rarely focus on the policy details and day-to-day commentary that is the standard fare of political blogging.  Instead, I delve into the broader issues that connect current political debates to the larger sweeps of history, culture, and faith. 

The health care fight is a good example of this.  Much is being said about whether a public option is necessary, why single payer was never allowed into the conversation, and how political and corporate interests have once again taken over the process.  As I see it, my role is not to argue any of these particulars, but is to ask larger questions - such as why we have such a toxic climate for productive debate, why the American public seems willing to tolerate millions going without care, and how we can foster an overall cultural climate that is more conducive to meaningful reform.

For a few of my articles that represent this type of focus on the deeper issues behind the progressive movement, please go here, here, or here.

I'll leave you with a quote from Friar Ron Rohlheiser:  “Don’t turn right. Don’t turn left. Go deeper.  Each side has a part of the whole picture — deep truths that must be cherished and protected. We get stuck in 'either/or' mode when we argue on the surface of our belief systems without going deeper into the assumptions that underly those systems. We need to seek 'both/and' mode, but that’s a very hard sell to people infected with the virus of ideology.

I hope to stir up a conversation about U.S. policy toward Israel and all the general issues I mentioned above.  Given the contentiousness of the subject, that shouldn't be hard at all.  With that introduction, let's get right to it.

German Muslim martyr: Marwa el-Sherbini

Haaretz reports that a crazed neo-Nazi stabbed a pregnant Muslim woman to death in front of her 3 year old son and husband. The incident began at a local playground when the woman, Marwa el-Sherbini, requested that the man allow her son to use the swings. The incident escalated and he began taunting her and attempting to tear her head-scarf off her head. She pursued a civil action against him in a Dresden court and won a judgment that included a fine.

He was appealing the verdict and she was about to testify in court when he attacked her with a knife he has somehow smuggled into the courthouse. The murderer stabbed her 18 times. When her husband came to her defense, a security guard mistook the husband for the attacker (how?) and shot him in the leg. He is now in critical condition in the hospital, he is a widower, his son is motherless and their second child, with whom she was pregnant is dead.

I understand the European courthouses do not have the same type of security American ones do. But given the acrimony in this case, how could the police and court authorities not have separated the parties to prevent precisely such an escalation?

Thankfully, the German Jewish community has had the sense to denounce this foul incident and joined with the leadership of the Muslim community to visit the husband where he is recovering from a stab wound inflicted by the killer and his other injury. The leader of German Jews said:

All those people who have in the past belittled our concern about a phobia against Islam in Germany are seeing after this awful act how wrong they were..." Officials from a German Muslim group and the country's main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim's husband is being treated. "You don't have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don't have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism," said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

I issue a challenge to Muslim-haters among us like Daniel Pipes to denounce this despicable act. Let us see whether there is any act of violence against Muslims which would trouble their consciences. We shouldn't let people like Abe Foxman off the hook either since the ADL claims a mission of combating racism and religious prejudice.

It is worth noting that the attacker is an immigrant from Russia where neo-Nazi and anti-foreigner sentiments runs deep. Vicious attacks on minorities of this sort are commonplace. How can the German authorities not have been more aware of the violent propensities of someone like this and done a better job of protecting the victims?

In a local Seattle incident eerily reminiscent of this hate crime, a Seattle Muslim woman wearing a head-scarf was threatened with a knife by a local white supremacist. This is from the Seattle Times coverage:

A self-proclaimed white supremacist with a history of threats and harassment was charged today under the state's hate crime statute after he allegedly threatened a young Muslim woman with a knife while she was waiting in line for services at the Seattle Indian Health Board...

...Eric Lee Garner walked up to the woman on July 1, pointed at her head scarf and said, "you Muslim people scare people when you wear things like that!" He followed up with other derogatory remarks. The woman, who was holding her six-month-old son, tried to reason with the 24-year-old Auburn man by saying that her "her clothing does not make her a bad person"...

When the insults didn't stop...the woman backed away from Garner and tried to shield her son from him. Garner then cursed at the woman, got in her face and pulled out a large sheathed knife, court papers said. Garner told the woman he was going to "cut" the woman and her baby with the knife, charging documents said.

One report says he threatened to "cut her genitals." Another says he called her a "Muslim bitch." Luckily a state employee intervened and took the knife away from the would-be attacker before he could use it. The Seattle Police (who sometimes DO do something right) arrested him the next day. He bragged to them that he owned an AK-47 which he'd purchased after 9/11.

Apparently, Garner is a real model citizen:

[He] has prior convictions for felony harassment, trafficking, theft, violation of a domestic violence court order, assault, indecent exposure and drug possession.

By the grace of God or a higher power, neither this woman or her infant were harmed. May the police and prosecutor learn a lesson from the German incident and keep this savage thug as far from his victim as possible during future legal proceedings.

Given the history of Muslim-Jewish violence in here in Seattle, where a mentally disturbed Pakistani-American attacked our local Jewish federation building and killed a staff member and wounded five others, it is imperative that the local Jewish community strongly denounce this Islamophobic act. Despite the violence swirling in the Middle East, we Jews have much more in common with our brother and sister Muslims that what divides us. We too are often the victims of prejudice and violence because of our religious beliefs. In fact, the wearing of a head-scarf, which provoked the German and Seattle attacks, echoes prejudice against observant Jews who wear a yarmulke. If we focus too much on the violence of the Israeli-Arab conflict, we forget what we share.

I hope that local Jewish groups here express their outrage at this incident and solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters in the face of Islamophobia. Rob Jacobs, local director of Stand With Us, a pro-Israel group which often expresses hostility to Palestinians and Muslims in general did criticize the attack saying: “Of course an attack, or, as in the case you refer to, threatening to attack anyone is wrong.” But along with this he launched into a harsh attack on me for even asking the question

This is unfortunately what a number of us liberals in the Jewish community have become used to on this question. Lots of heat and very little light. Paranoia and defensiveness but very little reason.

I’ll be covering foreign affairs from a cartoonist’s angle here at FDL. As I work at New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force, all too often I end up drawing on news from the region, but expect plenty on the District as well.

My blog is Mideast by Midwest – needless to say, I’m a Hitchcock enthusiast whose orientation is caught between the fertile crescent and the Great Lake state. Originally from the suburbs of Detroit (off 10 Mile Road, if you dig Slim Shady), I finished up Brown University and showed up in the District last year.

To give you a taste of what I've been publishing - my latest drawings have been on the retro nature of last week's headlines, Iran, Obama in Cairo, and the always cartoonogenic Kim Jung Il.

Stay tooned...

I like to write about whatever catches my attention--sometimes it's a moment of sheer hypocrisy on Morning Joe, other times it's an observation of the pattern of racist comments made by Republican elected officials, staffers, and activists.    I tend to be moved by things that I find outrageous--Pat Buchanan defending an accused Nazi war crminal, the mainstream media ignoring candidate McCain's close personal relationship with convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy.  I think the idea I have in my head is that I'd like to be a kind of bizarro-world Winston Smith--the polar opposite of the protagonist in Orwell's 1984.  Smith's job in the book is to bury the truth, to re-write the past to hide truths embarrassing to political rulers.  My goal is to do the opposite--to expose hypocrisy and reveal truths that may be missed by the traditional media.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here and look forward to continuing to have the chance to channel my outrage with media and politics into blog post form.

I'm extremely excited to be here, meet all of you, and get to work together. A bit about me: I'm a musician, a writer, and an organizer. I came to blogging through my colleagues here, Alex Thurston (who you'll hear from soon) and Lance Steagall. Blogging was the start of my political awakening in 2006. Before then, I was a music student in the midwest. Now, politics is my full time job.

I work for Health Care for America Now in the online department. I blog for the campaign, so you'll be seeing a lot of those posts here at The Seminal. While I won't deny that these posts represent an institutional viewpoint, I try to make them as engaging and truly useful as possible. Seeing as health care is such a big issue right now, I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about, and I'm looking forward to getting into the nitty-gritty with people here. I'm a fan of the horse race, but I like getting down into the policy even more.

My interests outside of health care range from foreign policy (Alex and I have been very active in talking about our mistakes in Afghanistan) to media consolidation and criticism, so expect some discussion of those topics from me.

Mostly, however, I'm interested and excited about this community and the progressive movement at large. It's an honor to be able to help grow a site that has such an active community, and I hope I can help make this a bigger part of the progressive conversation. I'll be reading diaries written here closely, and we'll be featuring a lot of your writing here on the front page. Discussion is what makes the progressive movement better, so that's what I'm looking for here.

I can be reached at seminal@theseminal.com. Feel free to contact me at any time.

And thanks for the warm welcome!

P.S. The diaries are back up and working. So have at it!

When we started The Seminal, we placed an emphasis on diversity and acceptance. We brought in writers of disparate interests and viewpoints, guided by the intuition that all the myriad angles, in fact, formed one interconnected picture - that articles dealing with the happenings in east Africa were not incongruent alongside posts dealing with congressional minutiae, political cartoons on our national media, or even poetry void of explicit political commentary. Our relative success seems to justify that model and validate our intuition, but my ambition for this site is that these connections be made more explicit; that all the disparate threads of interest and concern will tie up nicely; that the existing community will at once expand and sharpen that web; that the many distinct parts will create a harmonious and easily discernible whole.

Let me offer a concrete example: as a recent graduate of NYU's MA program in Latin America and Caribbean Studies, my writings have focused on events south of our border, ones that appear at the fringes of the US political radar, if at all. These incidents, however, do not happen in isolation. If one views the events in Andean nations like Colombia and Bolivia, and chooses to pull upon those threads, they are led north, to the turmoil in Central American nations like Guatemala or El Salvador, to the violence just south of our border, to our failed War on Drugs, to our swollen military budget, to our overcrowded jails, and then to more localized incidents like drug busts in Washington, gang-plagued communities in Long Island, and immigration raids in Iowa. And each of these threads leads, in turn, to myriad others, proving that political issues operate under the same six-degrees of separation that bind us together as humans.

With luck, all the disparate members of Oxdown's existing community will feel at home within this larger narrative. Not only will an expanded scope make us all more informed, better citizens, it will create a broader sense of community, and build networks that will result in a more cohesive, and more effective, progressive community. It's a big task, but I've faith that we're all up to it. We didn't come to FDL to advance small aims. We came to realize grandiose visions.

I can be reached at lgsteagall@gmail.com, and I welcome all feedback, negative or postive.

PS, The diary posting functionality is temporarily down. We'll have it up and running shortly.

We've been close to The Seminal folks for quite a while now. Our managing editor, Gregg Levine, is a veteran of their pages, and Jason Rosenbaum has been an FDL contributor (and good friend) for several years now. Many other Seminal regulars have contributed to Oxdown in the past.

The Seminal is one of a very small number of newer general interest blogs to have shown steady growth in recent years, and now they bring that forward progress to the FDL. The Seminal’s regular writers represent a wide range of expertise and life experiences—from economics, religion, law, and foreign policy, to electoral politics and social activism—as well as a wide range of ages. Many involved with the site are still in their twenties, and we are really excited to encourage the participation of a new generation of activists in online political organizing.

Though Oxdown as a name will not exist after the weekend, the Seminal is not replacing it—this move will be a true merger of our communities, drawing on the energy and strengths of both groups to provide a vibrant and visible place for all who want to contribute to our progressive political dialogue.

Welcome friends, old and new!

Atrios replies by both agreeing and disagreeing, but ultimately concluding a strong public option is the essential component of a reform bill and the focus of rallying support.

They're both right, but to see this, you have to distinguish between reforms we must do now to save lives under the current system and the foundations we have to lay to move to a restructured health care system.

Part of the problem is that it will take years to build the exchanges (called "gateways" in the HELP Committee bill) that Klein keeps mentioning. The public plans is an available choice within an exchange. Under the HELP bill, the Gateways are state-based institutions, which means each state/region has to establish one (or the feds intervene), and we know from experience this will take many years to get every state on board.

While I agree that the exchange concept is necessary (e.g., because some entity has to implement/enforce minimum standards, coverage requirements and eligibility), Ezra apparently assumes that the availability of the public plan occurs when an exchange opens. That means access to the national public plan depends on the progress each state makes in building an exchange. That's a mistake.

The national public health plan should be created and become available independent of the exchange start-ups. People need to be able to choose the national public option as soon as possible - within 1-2 years -- and not have to wait for their state to get its exchange running.

In the meantime, tens of thousand of people will die and/or suffer from untreated illnesses. Hundreds of thousands more will go bankrupt because they don't have health insurance, can't afford care because their underinsurance doesn't cover it, or find they have fraudulent insurance from companies who have hired legions of people to make sure their claims aren't paid and their health problems aren't covered by the insurance they thought covered them.

That means that regulations outlawing the most egregious insurer practices -- exclusion for prior condition, rescission, unwarranted price discrimination, excessive co-payments and limits on total out-of-pocket costs, etc -- are absolutely essential immediately, regardless of how the public plan debate is resolved.

So whether we're building a single payer system or building a hybrid or transitional system that includes exchanges and a public plan that, through people exercising choice, could move in that direction, we have to have other interim reforms enacted immediately to reduce the deaths and financial hardships imposed by the current system.

Some of Ezra's "more important" elements address this need. He argues, for example, that we need to expand Medicaid and the number of people eligible for it, not because Medicaid is a great system -- it's not and it varies state to state -- but because it's in place and we can quickly move 10 million low-income, uninsured people into it. This is needed triage.

We can also start requiring insurance, not because an individual mandate, reenforced by an employer mandate and contribution ("play or pay") is a good long-run solution -- it's not -- but because we can get additional millions covered with something and subsidize their premiums. The size of, and eligibility for, the subsidies determine how many people get covered -- that is, how many millions of people don't go bankrupt, die or suffer from untreated illnesses. This is more essential triage, and as Klein notes, we need to advocate more liberal rules for providing these subsidies.

For the intermediate-to-long run, Ezra has been right to focus on building the exchanges. And he now sees that if the exchanges are going to be the mechanisms by which the public plan puts strong competitive pressure on private insurers to shape up or lose market share, there must be an "open access" rule (my terms from earlier posts). People have to be free to enter the exchange and choose the public option; the "Gateways" have to be open doors, not walls to keep people out while shielding the private insurers.

Klein is also right that just having something called a "public plan" is insufficient. The public plan has to be strong enough to attract people away from the private insurance system that has failed us. As I've written before, the public plan can't perform this critical function if the market is separated so that most people aren't allowed to choose the public plan.

Progressive bloggers should be reading Klein and Atrios as consistent, complementary. Klein's list of other important matters is correct, and Atrios' point that we need the public plan both for it's own sake and as a rallying point to generate political support is also true.

The public plan is critical for the long run transition and forcing the private insurers to reform or be replaced. But there are lots of other essential reforms we should make now to prevent deaths and suffering while we're building a reformed health care system.

More:
Rahm Emanuel, public health enemy?
Adam Green at Open Left, Obama to Rahm, Shut. Up.
Yglesias, what Max Baucus knows about France
HuffPo/Sam Stein, Obama tells Rahm to listen to Hamsher
Jonathan Cohn, how come other countries do this better?

Last minute donations pushed us over the top to match a $75,000 challenge grant - thanks one and all for the extra effort!

From Laura Flanders:

We needed to raise $5,000, in order to claim a matching grant of $75,000.

Cutting to the chase -- in response to our pitch -- 120 viewers contributed $5,713 in just four days!

We made our match -- and truly, we're celebrating!!!

Thank you, Jane. Thank you, FiredogLakers (especially all those of you who had problems with Paypal but persisted and found a way.)

Details here