My wife and I watched the discussion, and the thing that struck me (beyond the arguments from the right boiling down to, if you think things are bad now, wait until the boogeyman comes) was that whenever the discussion turned to actual policy, Daschle and Maddow were the only ones talking. When what a public option would mean on a structural level was the topic, Coburn and Armey had nothing to say.

The reason for this is simple enough, of course. When it comes to policy, the Republicans aren’t interested. If they had any ideas, they could easily put up their own plan, but the only idea they have is to scare people into leaving things the way they are. Their hope is that the nebulous idea of “change” that won over the electorate will become frightening if they can tie it to their Soylent Green nightmares.

And why do they want that? Well, I can’t speak for anyone on the right, but this is what it looks like. They are looking out for the interests of insurance companies, and don’t care the slightest bit about any actual Americans. Worse, they are trying to push the binary politics of Republican vs. Democrat for the sole purpose of bringing their party back from the brink of irrelevancy.

Politics may have become binary, but policy is not. A public option for insurance is a relatively new idea in the debate in this country, but it’s a damn good idea. It’s the bridge between a Massachusetts-style personal mandate requiring the purchase of insurance and a single payer system where everyone is covered. It also uses the power of the market and competition to drive down costs, which you might think the Right would cheer, if you thought they were honest brokers.

August is half over. Congress comes back into session soon. The President has signaled that he’s open to compromise on the public option. But compromise only works when both sides are willing to give something up. The Right is intransigent. It’s time to give up on the notion of bipartisanship and actually have a good bill.

As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.

Considering the amount of support among doctors for healthcare reform, it’s time to ask whether the AMA’s progressive members need to send a message and quit the group.

The AMA is a professional association with a quarter million member doctors. The AMA provides a seal of approval to the nation’s medical professionals, but over the years they have always opposed any government involvement in healthcare, whether it’s Medicare or, now, the public option.

In a way, it’s understandable. Most doctors get paid mostly through insurance coverage, and a public plan would almost certainly pay them less. At the same time, their insurance costs (malpractice insurance and other costs of doing business) are through the roof.

But the AMA taking this stand for its members makes no sense to anyone for whom logic is a factor. You see, the idea of the public option is to make health insurance more affordable to every American, who would then be covered and wouldn’t have to rely on emergency departments for routine medical care.

It would make sense for the health of the nation, not to mention for the bottom line of medical providers, to support a public option, as in the current configuration the uninsured are an explicit drain on the system. Making the change to a Medicare-style public option for all Americans just seems like the most intelligent thing we can do right now.

Will it lead to single payer? Only if the medical insurers don’t offer competitive plans. In a way, public medical insurance may be the most free-market idea in medical insurance ever.

So, wait a minute, you think that the President only stands with some people and not others because he blasted the people who caused and exacerbated the global economic crisis we’re now facing? Because that’s what you’re saying here.

Just a tiny little suggestion, if you’re trying to win back the middle class, don’t make it quite so obvious that you’re standing with the investment firms and hedge funds whose greed necessitated the biggest government bailout of financial institutions in US history.

Toyota plans to introduce its plug-in hybrid electric vehicle late this year, a year earlier than originally planned, and a year ahead of the Chevrolet Volt, a senior Toyota executive said Sunday.

James Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said in an interview that Toyota planned to initially make about 500 plug-in hybrids, which will be made available first to commercial customers. About 150 plug-ins will be slated for customers in the United States, Mr. Lentz said.

GM is hoping that the Volt will save it from the brink.  With Toyota pushing up their plug-in, it seems that there would be even more incentive for GM to speed up its development.

And given the economy right now, perhaps there could be some incentive to make them affordable?  Maybe?

22 year old Oscar Grant, unarmed, handcuffed, prone, restrained held down by two cops, was shot and killed by a third cop. Grant’s death leaves behind a young daughter, a reeling community, and, oh, yes, amateur video aplenty.

That’s how we actually know that Grant was restrained and posed no threat.  The cop that shot him had a good view from directly next  to him, so there does not appear to have been any question about the situation.  The officer reached for his holster, drew his gun, aimed and fired.

One of the early theories put forth by investigators is that he thought he was reaching for his Taser and not his gun.  Nevermind that they are kept in different holsters on opposite sides and feel nothing alike, but what the hell would he have been using his Taser for anyway?  Grant had been subdued, he was pleading with the cops not to hurt him, that he has a young daughter at home.

And now that daugter will be growing up without a father because some kid with two years on the BART police force reached for the wrong holster when he shouldn’t have even been reaching?

Tough to get my brain around.  Tough to understand how something like this happens.  Tough to see how a cop killing an unarmed and handcuffed father disappears from the news, with hardly any national coverage. Google searching doesn’t pull up a whole hell of a lot of articles on this story, and I’ve seen far more reporting in blogs than in newspapers.

This isn’t Rodney King; we aren’t joining an excessive beating in the middle.  The video that has emerged shows Grant to be agitated but complying.  And then it shows him being murdered.  Shot in the back while restrained.  What the fuck?

corrected some facts with strike-outs above; sorry for the sloppy

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

Nice of you to think of that now, Mitch.  You didn’t seem to think that was all that important when bailing out the banks, who are getting billions in public money with no oversight, but now you want to stick it to the citizens who are unemployed or underemployed and would be helped directly by an infrastructure-based stimulus plan.

It’s brazen, I’ll give him that.  It’s also stupid.  You have an incoming president-elect with approval numbers in the upper ionosphere, promoting a popular idea that would put people back to work, and you decide that this is your Little Bighorn. There is no political way to win this from that position. If it doesn’t pass, you’ll have won the battle but lost the war, as the Republican Obstructionist brand takes hold. If it does pass, you’ll have lost anyway and will be seen as utterly ineffective. Just from a political standpoint it seems like McConnell should be supporting anything Obama says on the economy right now.

And, on the other hand, if this is a position based on deeply held convictions, we will finally have the man’s soul laid bare, alas a few months late to vote him out of office.

(h/t Political Wire)

If you’re going to have a bad year, why not have the worst year? If the Lions had gone 1-15, folks would say, “Wow, Detroit was really awful.” But by going without any wins at all, people get to say, “Wow, no one has ever been this awful.”

Isn’t it better to be memorable? No one cares about those who are merely awful, but everyone cares about those who uniquely dreadful.

I say, embrace the historic nature of unrivaled failure. Take pride in being a part of something truly “special.”

I think we can read in this a lesson for our #43, as he tries to bolster his reputation with the Bush Legacy Project.  Really, should he not just own up to his utter failure and claim the mantle as the worst President ever, combining the military success failure of LBJ with the economic success failure of Herbert Hoover and the general corruption of Dick Nixon? Bush also had the inherent nepotism of John Quincy Adams and a bloated self-importance that was all his own.

So, own it, Mr. President.  You’ve earned your place in history.

Pinter’s dead.

[pause]

Eartha Kitt too.

[pause]

Well, Crap.

Christmas is Coming–missing
A Baby Just Like You–missing
Deck the Halls–missing
When the River Meets the Sea–missing
Little Saint Nick–missing
Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913
The Christmas Wish

Workers laid off from their jobs at a factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they’ll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.

About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began their sit-in Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant’s operation.

Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days’ notice required by law before shutting down.

Workers also were angered when company officials didn’t show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, she said.

So, workers are staging an action over severance, back vacation pay, and most of all, the WARN Act. The WARN Act provides that in a situation like this, where a mass lay-off will be happening, the workforce will be given 60 days warning. Long enough for many to find new jobs, get training to change careers, and then the company must provide a severance of some kind.

When I was working at RCN and they closed my call center, that is exactly how it happened. 60 days before they gathered us and gave us the news. At the time, it seemed unbelievable, but it also seemed like a long time, time enough to find something new. Some did, many did not. I was unemployed for six months from September 2003 to March 2004.

The workers at the Republic plant did not get this time before the doors were to close. So they are keeping the doors open.

During the peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.

“We’re doing something we haven’t since the 1930s, so we’re trying to make it work,” Fried said.
…
Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said authorities were aware of the situation and officers were patrolling the area.

In other words, they’re hardly engaging in malicious acts. This is a modern sit-in, they won’t be cowed, and I kind of want to bake brownies for them. Alas, delivering them would be tough.

On the one hand, they’re right.  Companies like GM and Citigroup employ, directly and indirectly, millions of people across the world.  Losing them would drive this already sick economy into a death spiral.

But there’s something to think about in calling anything too big to fail.  Beyond abandoning the free market, which is supposedly God to many economic policy makers, it also points to the failure of deregulation.  These companies got so big because the anti-monopoly, regulatory, post-robber-baron financial world that was in control for most of the 20th Century got chucked out in the Reagan Revolution, and the trend continued through Clinton until Bush 2 got into power and totally screwed the pooch.

Yes, we should be bailing out the big companies right now.  But there have got to be strings included.  And one of those strings should be that no company be allowed to get where it is too big to fail.  Companies fail all the time, and new companies come along.  It’s financial natural selection.  That’s what commercial bankruptcy is for.  We shouldn’t get to a point where any company is too big to declare bankruptcy if that’s what is needed.

Just a couple weeks ago, GM was talking about buying Chrysler as a way to get both companies out of trouble.  That’s the opposite of what should happen.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling “terrorist” and “kill him” until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin’s attacks.

Again, this should not be surprising to anyone who was paying attention at the end.  The only good thing I can think of is that it finally forced some daylight onto the ugliness that still exists.  It’s been underground for a long time, not accepted in the public sphere. 

My hope is that, now that it’s more visible, it will get the push-back that it needs.

* corrected spelling in the title.

Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.
…
This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

FDR nearly failed because he didn’t go far enough.  That’s almost blasphemy, but it’s true.  Obama needs to do more, and do it fearlessly.

A new WPA based on a new power infrastructure is a first and necessary step.  Our current power grid is not just prone to failure but vulnerable to an attack.  It was just a few years ago that most of the eastern seaboard was shut down by a single outage, and we haven’t fixed it enough since then to avoid the same thing happening again.

Also, a new power grid could more efficiently transfer electricity generated from new sources.

This would need to be coupled with a reinvestment in physical infrastructure, the roads, bridges, railroads, waterways and other ways that we get our selves and our stuff from place to place.  It’s been 50 years since the last major project, the Eisenhower highways, and Obama has indicated that this is something to invest in.

These two projects alone would generate many jobs and a lot of revenue which would then fund more structure reinvestment.  America has been in a terrible accident, but we can rebuild her.  We have the technology.

Second change: more writing.  No, really.

Third change: still more to come.

Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with “but he’s a f—–g n—er!”.

It gets better from there.  If by better, you mean, worse.

But today, McCain raised a new question that could escalate that sound-bite campaign war: Who is he “gonna test” if elected president? And how?

“I have been tested,” McCain said, with a certain gritted-teeth look at the state fairgrounds in New Mexico. “I’m gonna test them. They’re not gonna test me.”

Oh, lord.  Does anything else actually need to be said?

ST. LOUIS (AP)—Blues goalie Manny Legace left after one period Friday night with a hip injury that occurred when he slipped on the carpet placed on the ice for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The Alaska governor dropped the ceremonial first puck before the Blues hosted the Los Angeles Kings. A narrow carpet walkway was placed from the gate at the Blues bench to center ice for Palin, her husband and two of her daughters.

That would be bad enough, but consider the last time she dropped a puck, it was for the Philadelphia Flyers, who went on to lose every game this season until last night, when the curse was passed on to the Blues.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

This, of course, misses one of the truths of campaigns.  The longer a campaign goes on, the more it resembles the candidate.  In Obama’s case, it has led to a smart and focused campaign.  On McCain’s side, the impulsive, whiplash-inducing spins that make up most of what we’ve seen are actually indicative of John McCain’s character.

At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.  John Sidney McCain III has gone all-in, and if he doesn’t win, he has nothing left.

“I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons,” [Rev. Arnold Conrad, past pastor of the Grace Evangelical Free Church] said.

“And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day,” he said.

McCain on Friday, from the same article:

On Friday during a town hall-style meeting in Lakeville, Minn., a supporter told McCain that he feared what would happen if Obama were elected. McCain drew boos when he defended his rival as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

In another exchange, a woman told McCain that she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Shaking his head and taking the microphone from her, McCain replied: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Either the campaign is not vetting its guests properly (a distinct possibility) or once again McCain is not speaking for his own campaign.  Something tells me it’s the latter.

From an idea by Mur Lafferty, executed by me.

McCain’s poll numbers have been going south since Lehman crashed.  It’s bad enough now that not only has McCain’s campaign dropped out of Michigan, but even Chuck Todd‘s conservative electoral map has Obama winning.

The McCain campaign is going 100% negative, bringing up Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, when there’s no reason that Obama’s surrogates can’t bring up Charles Keating, G. Gordon Liddy, Sarah Palin’s ties to the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, etc.

And with the top of the ticket plummeting, so are races downticket that shouldn’t have been within reach.  Polls have shown that Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) are both in serious danger of losing their Senate seats, and that’s among those that aren’t open R seats.

Even better, though, John McCain has decided on a course of political suicide.  When discussing how the McCain-Care plan, with its $1.3 trillion pricetag would be paid for (keep in mind, this plan includes taxing healthcare benefits for the first time ever, and would only provide $5,000 to replace a $12,000 insurance plan), a spokesman said that they would be cutting into Medicare.

MEDICARE.  That’s going to play well in Florida.  And Arizona.

Now is not the time to get complacent, though.  Now is not the time to lean back and savor the moment.  Now is the time to bury them.  Now is the time to make sure that everyone in Washington knows that the old politics is over.

To paraphrase Karl Rove, we will fuck them.  We will fuck them like they have never been fucked before.  We will take them out of the equation and fix their mess.  Because we must.

Patriotism demands it.