Fatalism or Fervor

For a Nobel Prize-winning academic, Paul Krugman has a remarkable talent for breaking issues down to their essence and making a simple, powerful case. In yesterday’s column he argues forcefully for strong financial regulation, suggesting that Barney Frank’s bill, which as already passed the House, is preferable to Chris Dodd’s (weaker) bill which has yet to clear the Senate. This is all well and good, and I urge everyone to write his/her elected representatives—Senators especially—to tell them how if we’re going to offer financial institutions de facto guarantees of bailouts in the event of their impending failure, they MUST submit to increased regulation so as to mitigate financial risk.

But I don’t want to talk any more about financial regulatory reform today; I want to talk more about climate change and about whether it makes any sense politically or personally to push for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s a list of things I believe related to climate change:

1. If current trends in human energy production and utilization continue without modification, the earth’s climate will warm dramatically over the next century.


2. Local effects of global warming are difficult to predict but likely will be significant and potentially disastrous.


3. If it were possible to avoid such a potential disaster without serious disruption to our way of life, it would be desirable to do so.


4. Meaningful action against climate change can take place only at a national and international level. In other words, it is only through the creation of new laws and new international treaties that human beings have any chance of forestalling dangerous climate change.


5. Meaningful action against climate change may not be achievable without serious disruption to our economies and our way of life. (For example, if beginning tomorrow, every motor vehicle on the face of the planet started driving half as much as it drives today and stuck to this reduced mileage indefinitely, that would only account for approximately 10% of the CO2 emissions reductions required to keep atmospheric CO2 under 450ppm at 2050.)


6. Given the difficulty of meaningful action and the likelihood of serious disruptions to our economies and our way of life, it is likely that useful climate change mitigation cannot be achieved, and it is likely that it will be actively disadvantageous to any individual, party or nation who aggressively pursues climate change mitigation in the face of general lack of action. (see Tragedy of the Commons.)


7. The scariest potential consequences of global warming all have to do with geopolitical instability and war, therefore the creation and improvement of structures to deal with mass migrations, conflict, and public health as well as efforts directed at nuclear arms reduction and anti-proliferation may be the most realistic and cost-effective ways to prevent a climate change disaster of world-historical proportions.


8. A massive investment in advanced energy technology research and development such as that called for by Bill Gates would likely be of short-term economic and political benefit and has a chance of forestalling the worst effects of our continued reliance on fossil fuels.
   

So I guess what I’ve done here is argue myself away from “fervor” regarding climate change and closer to “fatalism,” though maybe not all the way there. I don’t believe that the worst possible effects of CO2-induced global warming are inevitable, nor do I believe that there is nothing we can do to improve the situation. The minimum we should expect of our political leaders is that they acknowledge publicly and repeatedly that global warming is coming, that it is caused by human action and that it is likely to be a big deal. We should expect our leaders to call for reasonable sacrifices on the part of citizens to mitigate greenhouse emissions and should ask for the creation of new relevant laws so long as they are not unduly disruptive to our economies. We should also be willing to knowledge that such efforts may still be insufficient and should prepare ourselves and our institutions to deal with the climate change that almost certainly will be coming.

Unconstitutional (2)

Today's NY Times has solicited opinions from a handful of legal scholars on the (un)constituionality of the health insurance reform law.

The view most favorable to the law's constitutionality--and the view that to me seems the least tortured--is that the "mandate" is nothing more than a new tax, a tax from which those who purchase private health insurance are exempt.

It does, however, seem entirely conceivable that the current Supreme Court will not see things this way. Let Roberts et al overturn the bill, I say. Sic semper tyranis! Let freedom ring, and all that. I should be free to die prematurely of untreated chronic disease because my employer can't afford group health insurance, shouldn't I? It would be the quintecence of tyranny for the government to force me to purchase health cover, wouldn't it? I mean, holy habeus corpus, Batman, they might as well just throw me in jail!

Obstructionism

from today's NY Times:

"A leading Republican predicted Sunday that President Obama's appointment of 15 officials while sidestepping Senate confirmation would make it more difficult to get bipartisan support for future legislation."

He, Lindsay Graham, is joking right? 'Bipartisan support...' That's comedy, right?

A priority for the Senate has to be fixing its rules. Executive branch appointments have piled up to a ridiculous degree, to the point where critical departments such as Treasury lack the management capacity to do their jobs. Some of the blame has to go to the Obama administration itself; they've been unusually slow in naming appointments, possibly to do with their unusually stringent vetting process. But despite how slow Obama has been in naming executive branch appointments, approvals have still piled up in the Senate thanks entirely to Republican obstructionism. The GOP has used every arcane trick in the Senate rule book to block approvals. We can huff and puff and scream at these spoilsport losers, but the only real answer is to change the rules to make such monkey-wrenching impossible.

Krugman on Republican Extremism

From yesterday's column:

"In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t."

The first sentence echoes what I said here. I don't know what I think about the rest of the quoted paragraph. Do we need two reasonable, rational parties? It seems to me that one reasonable, rational party is quite enough so long as that party holds power. William F. Buckley Jr. struck me as the very personification of reason and rationality, and yet I wouldn't want him or anyone who thought remotely like him in office setting policy. I'd rather have my conservative opponents acting like a pack of crazed buffoons than smart, suave, Mephistophelean Buckley clones. Crazed buffoons are easier to beat.

The other advantage to the extreme rightward shift of the GOP is that it lessens the degree to which Democrats need to cater to the middle. To the degree that the Republican Party starts to look like the political wing of the Michigan Militia, Democrats can pursue an activist, progressive agenda without fear that they'll lose centrist voters to the Republicans.

To hell with bipartisan cooperation! The Republicans cannot be negotiated with, lets crush them instead.

Where to From Here?

How quickly the complexion of things changes. A month ago--heck, a week ago--the pundits were chattering on about how Obama had overreached here and made his case poorly there and how the Democrats were certain to lose the House in November and leave Obama a lame duck before he could even get started. Now the "news analysis" pages are lit up with praise for the Democrats' historic achievement with health care reform and asking what the next big legislation will be.

It seems that financial regulatory reform is going to be the next big thing and will likely come down the pike fairly soon. Chris Dodd's bill has already cleared the Senate Banking Comittee, and is on its way to the Senate floor. The Republicans could, of course, filibuster, but one wonders how keen they are to be seen to carrying the big banks' water. So some kind of financial regulation is likely to emerge and get signed into law... I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on whether Dodd's bill goes far enough. My uninformed hunch is that, rather like health care reform, it's a big step in the right direction but one that doesn't quite get all the way home.

What I want to know more, though, is when are we going to hear more about climate change? My fear is that we're going to have to wait a long time before carbon emissions reduction gets back on the agenda. To make the case for CO2 emissions reduction, you have to make the case for sacrifice--on everyone's part--and sacrifice is a hard sell at the best of times, much less when you're facing 10% unemployment and double digit budget shortfalls across the board. The thing is, we may not have time to wait for the economic climate to improve. Depending on who you read and how big a factor you believe methane clathrates in the Siberian permafrost will be, we might have as little as five years before global warming becomes a runaway train and it no longer makes any difference at all whether we adopt a cap-and-trade plan, a carbon tax or stick with business as usual.

The Copenhagen climate conference was a dud. The best that came out of it was an agreement to acknowledge the existence of the global warming problem. And yet had the US come with a greenhouse emissions scheme enshrined in law, indications were that China may--underline 'may'--have been willing to talk turkey on a binding emissions reduction treaty. And yet I fully understand that going into a Congressional election having voted 'yes' on legislation that doubles your constituents' electric power bills and the price of gasoline would be political suicide. I don't know how to overcome this impasse. The fact remains that it is going to be very difficult to persuade the general public that climate change will be a life- and civilization-threatening disaster until actually begins to draw blood--by which time it will be too late to forestall.

Maybe Al Gore should go back and run for the Senate again. How much more good could he do on the global warming front with the power directly to craft legislation then he does now by jetting around the world giving PowerPoint presentations and testifying before the Congress of which he once was a member? To bad that neither of Tennessee's Republican Senators are up for reelection in 2010. Would Gore consider a run for the House? Seriously, why the hell not?

Unconstitutional...

Fourteen states have filed lawsuits over health insurance reform, all based on the claim that the law's requirement that everyone purchase insurance is unconstitutional. Republican attorneys general of Florida, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington, as well as the Democratic attorney general of Louisiana have all filed suit, and one supposes that with a 5-to-4 Republican majority on the Supreme Court--and if you believe that the SCOTUS is a "non-partisan" institution, I have some reclaimed swampland in Florida I'd love to sell you--there's some chance the law might get overturned.

Bring it on, I say. Such a turn of events would be...clarifying. For one thing, it would give the lie to the idea of Roberts et al eschewing judicial activism and legislation from the bench. For another, it would lend momentum to the push for even more meaningful, comprehensive health care reform:

"So, you say it's unconstitutional for the government to force you to buy private health insurance? All righty, then. How about instead we just abolish private health insurance altogether and expand Medicare to cover the entire population? Would you call that unconstitutional? How so? Is it unconstitutional for Medicare to provide insurance coverage for your grandmother right now? If not, then why should it be unconstitutional for Medicare to cover you and your children too?"

Essentialism

George Packer blogging on the House health care vote over at The New Yorker:

"The Democrats’ speeches were hardly inspiring. Nancy Pelosi...is a poor public speaker, and most of her colleagues managed to turn high political drama into garbled litanies of policy prescriptions. The Democrats are as averse to boiling things down to their essence as the Republicans are addicted to it."

Too true.

One gets the feeling that maybe, just maybe left-of-center politicians are beginning to get the idea that it will help more than it will hurt to speak about how wrong the Republican opposition is, wrong morally, intellectually and pragmatically too, wrong in every way that it is possible to be wrong. And yet still no one on the left seems quite able just to break it down and call a spade a spade. Obama has his moments, but especially when he's off script he all to easily slips into Gore-esque policy-heavy wonkese.

We need Democratic candidates to get out on the stump slinging fire and brimstone:

"In this election you have a choice between two candidates and two conflicting philosophies. And just in case any of you may feel unsure about the nature of that choice, let me make it clear for you. Over there you see a candidate who believes that the government is evil, that anything the government does to regulate the activities of rich men and giant corporations is an abomination before God. With me you stand with a man who knows that the government is nothing more and nothing less than all of us working together towards a common goal. Government is not evil. It is no worse--and no better--than we are ourselves.

"Over there you see a candidate who believes that wealth is created solely by individuals. He does not see that rich men and corporations are free to earn their billions only because we, the people of the United States of America, grant them leave to do so. He denies the existence of such a thing as the social contract. He denies that you, the people who constitute the government of the USA have any right whatsoever to a share of the profits of any of the great corporations which thrive only because you have granted them permission to thrive. If you give that man a chance, he will end taxation. Sounds good, right? 'No taxes! Money for everybody!' But who will reap the lion's share of the benefits? You? Hell, no! It'll be Exxon making out like a fox in the hen-house. And Halliburton. And Dow Chemical. And Goldman-Sachs, and so-on and so-on. Meanwhile that candidate and his cronies are going to cut your health coverage down to nothing; they're going to deny your children an education; they're going to deny your cities money to build roads and parks and public transportation systems; they're going to deny your democratically elected government the financial means to do any good for anybody at all. Hell, the only thing he will be willing to spend money on will be prisons--just so when we finish slamming shut the door of opportunity on the most troubled young people among us we have a big enough hole in which to lock them up and throw away the key."

Tactical Lessons

John Judis has an informative post up on The New Republic website today that describes some of the work done by liberal activists in support of insurance reform. Appropriately he talks about Obama's somewhat belated but no less critical efforts to take the case for reform directly to the people with a series of speeches, but he also talks about how liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and Health Care for America NOW! pressured wavering Democratic representatives with television ads and threats of funding primary challengers.

Jonathan Chait has written a somewhat less cogent post, also on TNR, mulling over whether Clintonism is or isn't dead. He describes Clintonism in political science terms as being an application of "median voter theory" which holds that the most powerful voter, i.e. the voter with the power to flip an election one way or another, is the voter whose views place him smack dab at the center of the political spectrum. Clinton and his compadres held that the best, possibly the only way for Democrats to win elections in a post-Reagan universe was to abandon any and all policy initiatives that didn't appeal directly to that median voter. I don't know whether or not Clintonism is dead, but I sure as hell hope so. I'm all in favor of compromises where compromise is due, but if you compromise everything to the will of some fictional average voter as defined by opion polls, what are you and what do you have to offer?

Let's have more of the kind of activism described in Judis' post--both from the President and from the party rank and file. The middle is nowhere. Better to lose an election than to make yourself into a fickle, ill-defined nulity. The "median voter" is the median voter because he doesn't know what in hell he wants. A true leader knows what's right and shows all who will follow how to get there.

Tell It, Paul!

Paul Krugman is hot in today's column, "Fear Strikes Out." He draws a contrast between the two major parties. On the one hand you have President Obama at the head of the Democratic Party, appealing to all that is sane and good and generous in us and on the other hand the Republicans, personified by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and the Tea Party protesters appealing to all that bent, craven, stingy and hateful.

None of this is new, of course. Reagan was better at the think-positive rhetoric than the current crop of GOP troglodytes--"It's morning in America!"--but Ronnie sowed fear and suspicion with the best of them. Remember welfare queens? And as Krugman points out in this very column, then California governor Reagan declaimed that the institution of Medicare would spell the end of the American way of life. I remember a black classmate of mine named Adrienne at my elementary school in Virginia who on March 30, 1981 ran down the corridor shouting, "Reagan got shot! Reagan got shot! I hope he's dead!" While I did not then and do not now wish death or physical violence on any person including Ronald Reagan or any of the current crop of Republican leaders, I will say that even at the age of eleven, Adrienne knew the score. She could read the code as well as any of Ronnie's placard-bearing constituents and could tell how little Reagan and his followers cared about her and her kind. What's remarkable to me is how little things have changed in this regard in the past thirty years. It's as if the election of a president who is not only--relatively speaking--a progressive, but a black progressive has stirred up a lot of truly foul sludge from the bottom of the barrel.

It's a good thing in the long run. Get the shit out in the open, I say. Get the bastards so spitting mad that they show their true colors. I can only add that it's a good thing we have people like Paul Krugman to shine a spotlight on them when they let their pants down. I just wish more politicians would follow suit. Obama doesn't have to be so damn nice to the Republicans. He ribbed them a little in the State of the Union, but it was a good-natured ribbing, like a joke between friends that don't always see eye to eye. The Republicans are not Obama's friends, and his assumption that at least a few of them could be won over with charm and reason very nearly cost him his great health care achievement.

But for now let's give three cheers that heath insurance reform did make it through. It is a great achievement for Obama, for the 111th Congress and for the nation.

Hip-hip, hooray!

Hip-hip, hooray!

Hip-hip, hooray!

Can They or Can't They?

The big vote is today. Something I read a few days ago suggested that the Dems wouldn't take it to a floor vote unless they had the votes in hand. Let's hope so.

Not that the legislation on the floor will fix it, but I don't think Americans have any idea just how screwed up their health care system is compared with others in the industrialized world. Within the last twelve hours a loved one of mine, not an American herself though with travel insurance, spent four hours waiting to get seen in an ER at a major hospital in a large American city. She was charged $350 up front, and when she asked for her credit card slip back after she decided to bag it and seek treatment elsewhere (In the end she copped free and timely treatment from a colleague at the medical conference she is attending) they told her they couldn't get the slip back; it was in a locked container. Just to be clear, the place was not crowded. In the four hours she waited, two other patients were called back for assessment.

Contrast this to the time a few months back when I stepped on a rusty nail. I needed the wound peeked at and a tetanus booster. I drove to Geelong Hospital here in Geelong, Australia, showed my Australian Medicare card, and the clerk noted down my details--no billing details required as public hospitals in Australia are funded by tax dollars and offer FREE medical care to all comers. The triage nurse looked at my foot then sent me to fast track, where I waited five minutes at most to get seen by a doctor. The medical assessment was efficient, largely because it wasn't encumbered by a lot of minimum requirements for billing. The doc simply looked at my foot, said the wound was shallow and wouldn't need antibiotics, then gave me my tetanus booster. I was in and out in twenty minutes tops. I have been a doctor and a patient in both the USA and Australia, and I can assure you that this sort of cheap, speedy, no bullsh** medical care can be found in only one of the two and it ain't the Land of the Free.

I'd challenge any conservative opponent of health reform who mouths the talking point about America's health care system being "the best in the world" as to what his measure of quality is. Life expectancy? Nah. Infant mortality? Nope. Patient satisfaction? No way. Value for money? Not even close. Absence of death panels? Well, it's true that this is no such thing in America but I don't know that it's a useful comparator. I've worked in Australian public hospitals for close to a decade. I've searched high and low and I've never seen a death panel. Not one.

The Money Problem

Michael Tomasky has published a solid if somewhat dry article in the current New York Review of Books entitled "The Money Fighting Health Care Reform." Somewhat frustratingly to this reform-obsessed liberal, he opens with a little I-told-you-so in which he rehashes an argument he made in 2008 to the effect that for his first year in office Obama should focus like Clinton's laser beam on the economy and specifically on jobs and defer any major initiatives until he had satisfied the voting public that he was a good economic steward. That's as it may be. This sort of politics-as-sport, Monday morning quarterbacking is exactly what I intend avoid in this blog, and so I will--avoid it I mean. It's the meat of Tomasky's piece, a heavily referenced catalog of the sources and targets of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into lobbying Congress on health care just over the past year that gets me riled up. Appropriately, he raises a question as to whether Congress is capable anymore of the kinds of sweeping reforms it passed in number in the 1960s and early 70s, and he cites two things, procedural rules such as the Senate cloture rule and the exponential growth in lobbying expenditures, as being key factors in preventing Congress from again becoming the progressive institution it was forty five years ago.

$3.47 billion was spent lobbying the federal government--mostly Congress--in 2009, a record. $544 million of that was spent by the health sector, with $267 million spent by the pharmaceutical industry alone. These figures include money paid to lobbyists in salary and expenses for lobbying-related activities such as dinners, conferences and junkets attended by public officials as well as individual campaign contributions and industry-sponsored issue ads. One fact that I found most telling is that a full ten percent of registered lobbyists are former Congressional employees including staffers and several former Representatives. Forget about how it might influence a Congressman for him to be wined and dined by some industry shill at a golf retreat on Hilton Head, how much more influential must it be if he knows that should he lose his reelection bid or should he decide to retire early from electoral politics, he can sell access for a high six-figure salary and not even have to worry about jetting home from Washington for face-time with his constituents?

It seems to me that this last part of it would be easy enough to fix. Just pass a law banning any Congressperson or staffer from acting as a lobbyist for a fixed period of time after leaving office. Five years, maybe? Maybe ten? Of course the folks most adversely effected by such a law are the ones who'd have to pass it, so don't hold your breath. And then this Roberts Court would just as likely overturn it anyway. As we now know, corporations are people and spending money is a speech act subject to First Amendment protections.

Here are some useful links suggest to me by the article:

Center for Responsive Politics aka OpenSecrets.org

Common Cause

Contact Undecided Representatives

The New York Times has put up a running tally of House of Rep votes on health reform. Find the link here.

Do not delay, if your representative is on the list of undecideds, use this Contact Your Elected Officials link and email or phone him or her NOW.

Just Do It

According to the NY Times a "new rift" has emerged over Medicare payments to states, complicating the push to lock in the 216 votes needed for passage of health care reform this weekend, this on the heels of a somewhat less anxious article yesterday talking about the House Democratic leadership's discussions about how to triage "no" votes, i.e. which Democratic Congressmen in marginal seats will be granted dispensation to vote against the bill.

I understand that this sort of gamesmanship is part of the deal. Congresspeople each represent a single district, not the nation as a whole and not the Party either. They at least need to appear as if they're doing all they can to get the most for their districts and their states. I get that. I just hope that the undecided Democrats in the House understand that now is their party's shot, their one and only. As I asked my Democratic Representative in an email, if the Democratic Party can't take advantage of holding both the White House and the biggest legislative majority in a generation, what good is it?

Health care reform...just do it.

The Republican Way of Wrecking Government

Today, the recently elected Republican governor of New Jersey, Christopher Christie, announced a new budget for his state that proposes to close an $11 billion deficit exclusively by cutting services while making no attempt to raise revenue through increased taxes. His plan includes an $820 million cut in aid to schools.

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of smaller government that lives within its means,” Christie said.

Could there be a better illustration of the Republican strategy? It goes like this:

A. In times of plenty, cut tax rates to absurdly low levels. Fix it so that the cuts lopsidedly favor corporations and wealthy individuals while simultaneously mouthing populist rhetoric about letting the working man hold on to his hard-earned dollar. No one will complain—yet—because as long as the economy remains strong, so will revenues, and demand for government services will remain relatively slight.

B. When economic growth slows and government revenue declines and state and Federal deficits balloon, as predictably they will, begin to intone righteously about “spendthrift government” and “tax-and-spend liberals” and to call for “government that lives within its means.”

C. Use every ounce of political power you can accrue—such as the governorship of the state of New Jersey—to cut the government down to as close to nothing as you can take it, all on the premise that you’ve been left with no choice by the spendthrift liberals who proceeded you.

What do you call it when a man would cut close to a billion dollars of funding for the education of the children of his state and yet won’t lift a finger to raise additional, existing revenue from the numerous billionaires and giant corporations that make their homes within his jurisdiction? I have a word for it: EVIL.

You want to talk about “death panels”? How many more kids in Newark or Camden or Atlantic City will die young of drugs, AIDS or gunshot wounds because Christie can’t find it within himself to tap Merck or American Cyanimid for an extra few hundred million dollars? It isn't like they haven't got it. The economy is growing again, right? Wealth is being created in New Jersey. Do businesses in the Garden State not think that they have an interest in seeing to it that the state's young receive a decent education? Do they think life will be better for their employees if New Jersey's streets are crowded with homeless schizophrenics who can no longer receive treatment at shuttered psychiatric clinics and hospitals?

I lived in Namibia for a time. Namibia has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in Africa, but it also has one of the most unequal wealth distributions of any country in the world. One can live in first-world luxury in Windhoek, the capital. There are plenty of Mercs and Land Rovers on the road. You can work out on the StairMaster at a Virgin health club which is attached to a shopping mall that rivals anything in suburban America. But across the street from the health club is a public high school that is in a state of total decay. School employees and boarding students live in unheated cinderblock dorms surrounded by shards of shattered glass from the windows, most of which have long since been broken. Few can afford the pay-as-you-go electricity and so cook their meals over fires of scrap wood. Weeds grow up through the basketball courts and a layer of dust coats every surface in the classrooms which are empty except for a collection of broken-down old desks dating from the 1970s. Further down the road, along the edge of town the numerous poor live in windowless boxes made of corrugated steel. Streams of raw sewage run down the hillsides, and these unfortunate people—who constitute a majority of Namibia’s population—are dying by the truckload of HIV and TB, so much so as to give Namibia one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

I'd like to ask Governor Christie what his model is for America’s future? I know he doesn’t take anyplace like Sweden or even Germany for a model. Those places are too “socialist.” But would he adopt Namibia as a model for America’s future? I doubt it. At least he wouldn’t admit as much. And yet, when you get behind the moralistic rhetoric of self-reliance, this is exactly what Christie and other Republicans are calling for, a country where the rich cling to every last dollar they can get their hands on and step across the prostrate bodies of the poor, the uneducated and the lame while they, the little kings and queens, make their way to their next gala ball. In other words, he wants America to be like Namibia.

The Taliban

A friend of mine suggested that I was going too hard on Democrats and that I should focus more of my animosity on the GOP. A Google search on "disgusted Democrat" will get you ten posts from conservative blogs about this or that nominal Dem who has jumped ship to the Republican Party in "disgust," usually over Obama administration policy. In light of these too points, I feel the need to make it plain that my own "disgust" with the Democratic Party stems purely from what I see as its failure to answer the Republican threat with enough clarity, consistency and force.

The Republican Party of today is dangerous, genuinely dangerous to our people's continued well-being. I don't argue that the GOP will institute a fascist takeover of the US or that they would support a Taliban-style Christian theocracy, but that doesn't make the threat any less real. The GOP has devolved into an organization whose motivating goal is the destruction of the Federal Government of the United States as a force for doing, well, anything. And the Republicans don't have to stage a revolution to accomplish this goal. They don't have to go into the streets. They simply bankrupt the government with absurd tax cuts and unfunded wars, use the Senate rules to block any legistlation coming out of that body, and use their majority on the Supreme Court to hamstring the government's ability to regulate industry. The Republicans aren't terrorists, but they are saboteurs. Earth First could learn a lot from the GOP about effective monkey-wrenching.

If I have been relatively silent on the evils of the Republican movement, it's because I don't believe that they can be persuaded. There's no point in arguing with them. Sure, their "policies" are completely incoherent and in the long run will bear disastrous consequences, but if a man is completely irrational showing him where his logic breaks down is a wasted effort; he's already demonstrated that he is immune to logic. Defeating Republicans in debate might make us feel good, but it does little to advance the goal of an effective, responsive Federal Government that enacts progressive policies to better Americans' lives. We have to beat these bastards at the polls.

Onward!

Vote Smart...and Tough

I'm including a link to Project Vote Smart in the sidebar. This is a great tool for finding out exactly how your elected officials are voting and, at least officially, what they're saying too. I've used it to learn more about my Democratic Congressman David Price. I've learned that unless I learn something about Price that I don't know, I can, in good conscience, work for his reelection. His votes have been on the right side of most of the issues I care about. Moreover, he has come out with a speech castigating the Supreme Court for its terrible, antidemocratic ruling overturning the McCain-Feingold law that had banned corporations from financing political campaigns, and has introduced legislation to take one small step towards mitigating this judicial tsunami by requiring the sponsors of political advertising to identify themselves.

I encourage everyone to take a look at Project Vote Smart to find out where his or her elected officials stand. If you're represented by a Republican, get down to your Democratic Party precinct to find out what you can do to unseat him. If you're represented by a Democrat whose record of votes, speeches and position papers demonstrates that he is a Democrat in name only (Joe Lieberman, I'm looking at you), then don't wait, start talking to everyone you know about alternative candidates who might be positioned to mount a primary challenge.

"But wait," you say, "do we really want to further jeopardize Democratic majorities in Congress by mounting a bunch of primary challenges? Aren't most of these blue dog Republocrats from marginal, right-leaning districts ripe for GOP takeover?" Yes, they are. And yes, if such right-wing Democrats get challenged from the left, it will make it harder for them to win reelection. To which, I say, "Good riddance." If the Congress fails to accomplish a damn thing, as it's threatening to do right now, better that failure be on Republican hands. A voting majority is useless if the members of that majority won't vote with the majority. We need Democrats unafraid to support an activist government, not panderers willing to make any and every concession to conservative, Republican demands simply to keep their seats.

Things I Believe

I believe that far from being a threat to our well-being, the democratically elected government of the United States of America is the only means by which many of the most pressing problems we face as a people can successfully be addressed.

I believe that as it has developed over the past fifty years, the Republican Party has devolved into an organization that seeks almost as a matter of principle actively to undermine the effective workings of the government.

I believe that the rules of the United States Congress and, in particular, the Senate must be modified in such a way as to prevent the Congress from being held hostage by intransigent electoral minorities.

I believe that within the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court and as amended by the people of the United States, a way must be found to limit the distorting effects of money on our local, state and national elections.

I believe that corruption encompasses more than simply the taking of bribes and kickbacks and refers more broadly to an official’s favoring of his own interests and those of his associates to the detriment of others to whom he owes a duty such as his constituents and the nation as a whole.

I believe that, so defined, corruption exists within the United States government and that if and when we see corruption, we fail to name it at our peril.

I believe that our democracy is not in any way inevitable but that instead it is contingent upon our own efforts, good will and good character.

I believe that the time to act is now.

Voting Records/Health Care Reform

Beyond doubt the health care reform bill passed by the Senate and now awaiting ratification in the House is imperfect. Many of us--me included--favor a Medicare-for-all, single-payer solution, but it is apparent that such sweeping reform is, for the moment at least, out of reach. Even a public option in the current market-based approach is apparently a bridge too far. I'm not happy about it, but I can accept it as the hand we've been dealt. What I can't accept is Democratic Congresspeople who can't find the wherewithal to vote even this limited reform through.

Whether or not reform passes (again) in the House, keep a close eye on how your Representative votes. If he/she is a Democrat and cannot muster the party loyalty to pass it, he doesn't deserve his seat and should be challenged in this year's primary. And if, heaven forbid, it doesn't even come to a vote, then we Dems must do a detailed postmortem and vigorously punish those responsible.

The Coffee Party

The existence of The Coffee Party has just come to my attention.

From the CP homepage: "We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans."

Damn straight.

Why This is Not Just Another Blog About Politics

Too much online political commentary is just about showing off the commentator's acumen, putting on display all of the commentator's arcane knowledge and securing kudos for making accurate predictions. I'll have none of that here. This is not a site for political junkies. This is a site for Democrats who want to take action and move their party and the nation in the direction we all understand that it needs to go.

I'm happy for anyone to comment on anything she or he reads here, but I'd be happier if she used the Contact Your Elected Officials link in the sidebar and sent her comments to a person in power. This blog is premised on the belief that speech equals a kind of action, but we recognize that speech will be ineffectual unless it is brought to bear in the right places.

One Disgusted Democrat

Times are tough for anti-corporate, big-government-loving, social-welfare-fixated progressive Democrat like me. The shine is off the Obama administration after a year of too much money for banks, too few jobs for the jobless, too little action in Congress and too infrequent communication from the White House. The Democrats in Congress act as if they're in the minority, running scared of their own shadow, meanwhile the Republicans perfect their strategy of pure negation.

In such a climate, what is two-fisted progressive to do? I toyed with the idea of starting a third political party of my own, dedicated to the proposition that the GOP has degenerated into a frankly pernicious force in American life, a party so utterly bankrupt that any attempt to deal with them in good faith--as Democrats to this day seem hellbent on doing--was self-defeating. I batted the third party idea around for a couple weeks, conducted a straw poll on the idea of a few similarly liberal-minded Internet friends of mine as well as a Democrats Abroad listserv. Soon, however, I came to recognize that third parties are doomed from their inception. Neither they nor their members will ever accrue any real power to change things. Moreover, I don't have any major disagreement with the general thrust of Democratic Party policy-making, at least as it is articulated by some of its more liberal adherents. The thing that drove me to the brink of fringe-party madness is the rank cowardice and mealymouthed inconstancy the Democrats displayed in the wake of Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts. I thought, "What, our majority drops to 59/41 and we just fold up our tent? We just let the Repubs strut around like this single-state victory, born out of Martha Coakley's hubris and Brown's good looks as much as anything else, gives them some kind of mandate? Here is one more Republican lie to go with all the others, and we just sit here and eat it? How can I be a part of this party of milquetoasts?"

The answer, of course, is that I can and I will for no other reason that I have no other choice. If America is ever to see universal health insurance coverage or an effective response to global climate change or any number of lesser but still significant improvements in our lives, it will be at the hands of Democrats. They're the only game in town. That doesn't mean, though, that every cowardly, uninspired schmuck of a Democratic incumbent needs to be supported in his bid for reelection. If the crazies of the Republican right can drag their officials rightward with primary election challenges and occasionally topple an incumbent altogether, there is no reason that progressives of the Democratic left can't do the same. If I lived stateside (I don't), I'd be going to precinct meetings, doing as much as I could to agitate within the Democratic Party for an aggressive response to the Republican threat. The time for deal-making and triangulation is over. What's at stake is our leaders' ability to govern in such a way as to address the problems that face us in a meaningful way. The Republicans don't want any governance at all. To paraphrase conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, they want to shrink the government to such point as it can easily "be drowned in a bathtub."