Nice contrast...
"Nothing makes me more angry," said Sen. Mitch McConnell at a health care town hall in Kansas City today, "… than the suggestion that America does not already have the finest health care in the world." Sen. John McCain, appearing alongside him, agreed: "The quality of health care in America is the best in the world."
From their closed-to-the-public "Health Care Reform Forum" in Kansas City today of just over 100 folks.
And this, which somehow seems so much more, well, reality-based
Until Medical Bills Do Us Part
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.
But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.
My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.
The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”
“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.
Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.
A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.
The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.
“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.
“I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. “The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”
So M. divorced the man she loves. I asked him what he thought of this. He can still speak, albeit not always coherently, and he paused a long, long time. All he could manage was: “It’s hard to say.”
Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.
A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.
M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.
“It’s just crazy,” she said. “It twists people like pretzels.”
The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.
In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.
So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.
If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Dr. Lakoff on the discussion surrounding health care
George Lakoff is one of the foremost progressive linguists and a keen student of the art of framing. His review of the debate surrounding health care goes back several years, and he recently wrote a nice, albeit long, piece for Truthout. It contains a link to an article he authored two years ago which goes a long way towards providing an understanding of the fundamental philosophical disagreement conservatives and liberals have on this issue and is a great read.
The logic of the health care debate -
The logic of the health care debate -
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Wonder if they will be investigating this...
No, not really wondering. I remember this tactic being used pretty frequently and had pretty much forgotten the election eve edition. Silly me...
Ridge Says He Was Pressured to Elevate Threat Warning
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 21, 2009 5:40 PM
Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, says that he was pressured by other Bush administration department heads to raise the national security-threat level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election -- a move he rejected as having such uncomfortable political undertones that it could destroy the administration's credibility.
The disclosure comes in Ridge's new book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . and How We Can Be Safe Again," written with Larry Bloom and published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press. It will not hit bookstores until Sept. 1, but a copy of the book was obtained Friday by The Washington Post.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft "strongly urged" that the threat level be raised just three days before the election, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sided with Ashcroft in the "vigorous, some might say dramatic discussion," Ridge writes.
Five days before the 2004 election, Osama bin Laden had released to al-Jazeera a message critical of President Bush. "As you spoil our security, we will do so to you," he threatened.
The next morning, a Saturday, Ridge and his aides huddled at DHS headquarters.
"A threatening message, audio or visual, should not be the sole reasons to elevate the threat level," they concluded, according to Ridge. Given that protective steps had already been taken in advance of the election, "No one felt it necessary to consider additional security measures," Ridge writes
A videoconference with members of the intelligence community and relevant Cabinet chiefs followed. The position Ashcroft and Rumsfeld took provoked Ridge to wonder, he writes, "'Is this about security or politics?'"
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert S. Mueller III sided with Ridge, he writes, and in the absence of consensus, no recommendation was made to White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.
Instead, a Ridge aide advised the president, who was flying on Air Force One to a campaign stop, through his aide Dan Bartlett that DHS was "strongly opposed" to raising the threat level, and by the next day the question was dropped.
"I believe our strong interventions had pulled the 'go up' advocates back from the brink," Ridge writes.
"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector."
He submitted his resignation within the month.
Other former Bush aides dispute Ridge's account. "I actually chaired the meeting and called it," Townsend told CNN on Friday. "Tom Ridge knew very well that I agreed with him that I didn't believe there was a basis to raise the threat level, but I knew there were others in the Homeland Security Council that did believe that and we agreed we'd have the conversation."
"Not only do I not think . . . that politics played any part in it at all -- it was never discussed," she said.
"In other parts of the book, Tom acknowledges that politics never played a role in any of his decisions about the threat alert system. So you have to wonder if this is not just publicity meant to sell more books," she added.
A spokesman for Rumsfeld rejected Ridge's assertion.
"The story line advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense," Keith Urbahn said in a statement. "During the fall of 2004, Osama bin Laden and an American member of al-Qaeda released videotapes that said in no uncertain terms that al-Qaeda intended to launch more attacks against Americans. . . . Given those facts, it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level."
The revelations in Ridge's book were first reported earlier this month by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but they drew national media attention -- and a flurry of denials from former administration officials -- only after U.S. News & World Report's "Washington Whispers" column. mentioned them Wednesday afternoon.
Ridge also reveals in the book that his relationship with Rumsfeld was distant, with the Pentagon chief rarely making himself available for meetings with his domestic security counterpart.
And Ridge says that he was never invited to a White House National Security Council meeting, that he was routinely "blindsided" by an information-withholding Federal Bureau of Investigation during Oval Office briefings, and that his efforts to establish regional Homeland Security offices in New Orleans and six other major cities in the years before Hurricane Katrina were thwarted by bureaucracy.
The man who oversaw America's airport screening was himself singled out for screening more than two dozen times, he reports.
Threat-level warnings became a subject of controversy in 2004 after one rise was declared just days after the Democratic National Convention that summer. The move was seen by some at the time as redirecting public attention toward an issue where Bush was stronger (terrorism) and away from questions about the war in Iraq being raised by challenger Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).
Some of the intelligence behind the alert was ultimately revealed to be three to four years old, though newly obtained.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland of Security," Ridge said at the time.
In the book, he admits that the public skepticism that greeted that warning helped inform his thinking heading into the pre-election discussion.
"We could fairly predict the public outcry of a national threat alert without sharing specific and credible information to justify it on the eve of an election," he writes. " . . . [W]e knew there was a widespread suspicion of such motives and tactics, and this could entirely undermine the credibility of not just the department, but the administration."
Ridge Says He Was Pressured to Elevate Threat Warning
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 21, 2009 5:40 PM
Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, says that he was pressured by other Bush administration department heads to raise the national security-threat level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election -- a move he rejected as having such uncomfortable political undertones that it could destroy the administration's credibility.
The disclosure comes in Ridge's new book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . and How We Can Be Safe Again," written with Larry Bloom and published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press. It will not hit bookstores until Sept. 1, but a copy of the book was obtained Friday by The Washington Post.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft "strongly urged" that the threat level be raised just three days before the election, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sided with Ashcroft in the "vigorous, some might say dramatic discussion," Ridge writes.
Five days before the 2004 election, Osama bin Laden had released to al-Jazeera a message critical of President Bush. "As you spoil our security, we will do so to you," he threatened.
The next morning, a Saturday, Ridge and his aides huddled at DHS headquarters.
"A threatening message, audio or visual, should not be the sole reasons to elevate the threat level," they concluded, according to Ridge. Given that protective steps had already been taken in advance of the election, "No one felt it necessary to consider additional security measures," Ridge writes
A videoconference with members of the intelligence community and relevant Cabinet chiefs followed. The position Ashcroft and Rumsfeld took provoked Ridge to wonder, he writes, "'Is this about security or politics?'"
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert S. Mueller III sided with Ridge, he writes, and in the absence of consensus, no recommendation was made to White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.
Instead, a Ridge aide advised the president, who was flying on Air Force One to a campaign stop, through his aide Dan Bartlett that DHS was "strongly opposed" to raising the threat level, and by the next day the question was dropped.
"I believe our strong interventions had pulled the 'go up' advocates back from the brink," Ridge writes.
"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector."
He submitted his resignation within the month.
Other former Bush aides dispute Ridge's account. "I actually chaired the meeting and called it," Townsend told CNN on Friday. "Tom Ridge knew very well that I agreed with him that I didn't believe there was a basis to raise the threat level, but I knew there were others in the Homeland Security Council that did believe that and we agreed we'd have the conversation."
"Not only do I not think . . . that politics played any part in it at all -- it was never discussed," she said.
"In other parts of the book, Tom acknowledges that politics never played a role in any of his decisions about the threat alert system. So you have to wonder if this is not just publicity meant to sell more books," she added.
A spokesman for Rumsfeld rejected Ridge's assertion.
"The story line advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense," Keith Urbahn said in a statement. "During the fall of 2004, Osama bin Laden and an American member of al-Qaeda released videotapes that said in no uncertain terms that al-Qaeda intended to launch more attacks against Americans. . . . Given those facts, it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level."
The revelations in Ridge's book were first reported earlier this month by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but they drew national media attention -- and a flurry of denials from former administration officials -- only after U.S. News & World Report's "Washington Whispers" column. mentioned them Wednesday afternoon.
Ridge also reveals in the book that his relationship with Rumsfeld was distant, with the Pentagon chief rarely making himself available for meetings with his domestic security counterpart.
And Ridge says that he was never invited to a White House National Security Council meeting, that he was routinely "blindsided" by an information-withholding Federal Bureau of Investigation during Oval Office briefings, and that his efforts to establish regional Homeland Security offices in New Orleans and six other major cities in the years before Hurricane Katrina were thwarted by bureaucracy.
The man who oversaw America's airport screening was himself singled out for screening more than two dozen times, he reports.
Threat-level warnings became a subject of controversy in 2004 after one rise was declared just days after the Democratic National Convention that summer. The move was seen by some at the time as redirecting public attention toward an issue where Bush was stronger (terrorism) and away from questions about the war in Iraq being raised by challenger Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).
Some of the intelligence behind the alert was ultimately revealed to be three to four years old, though newly obtained.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland of Security," Ridge said at the time.
In the book, he admits that the public skepticism that greeted that warning helped inform his thinking heading into the pre-election discussion.
"We could fairly predict the public outcry of a national threat alert without sharing specific and credible information to justify it on the eve of an election," he writes. " . . . [W]e knew there was a widespread suspicion of such motives and tactics, and this could entirely undermine the credibility of not just the department, but the administration."
More talking about the elephant in the middle of the room
And why, again, is the public option so scary?
All the President’s Zombies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
So why won’t these zombie ideas die?
Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.
How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.
All the President’s Zombies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
So why won’t these zombie ideas die?
Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.
How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Time for the dems to reach down and find their collective balls
Care of my bro-ham-ster:
Profiles in Courage
On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, “Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want to be called black?” (One does not need to ask what he called African Americans before he learned to say “negra” instead.)
But he supported the Act, and he signed it into law, ending two centuries of American apartheid. And he did so at the greatest of all political risks:
“President Johnson realized that supporting this bill would risk losing the South's overwhelming support of the Democratic Party. Johnson told Robert Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen; "I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway." Senator Richard Russell, Jr. warned President Johnson that his strong support for the civil rights bill "will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election." The South indeed started to vote increasingly Republican after 1964.” (More)
And so it came to pass. The Dems did indeed lose the South -- and what of the South they held was only held by putting up for office closet Republicans masquerading as Democrats (AKA “Blue Dog Democrats.")
Over the decades that followed Johnson's personal profile in courage, Republicans gained ground. As the South went red it laid the foundation for Newt Gingrich Republican revolution. From that switch from blue to red flowed many awful things; Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, a conservative-leaning federal judiciary, the near-total destruction of America's once robust industrial base, the knee-capping of the American middle class, an illegal war, torture, financial collapse, and more.
So, did Lyndon Johnson really do the right thing?
Of course he did the right thing. Doing the right thing often means doing the hard thing... which is why doing the right thing is always such a rare and notable in event Washington. After all, if doing the right thing were risk-free and easy, they'd do it more often. Not always, of course, because there's those contributors they have tend to, but more often.
I only mention this because right now, this month and next month are President Barack Obama's Lyndon B. Johnson moment. He will either do the right thing, and go down in history alongside Johnson and Lincoln and FDR, or he won't.
In this case the right thing is for Obama to have a little chat with two groups:
First a chat with House and Senate Republicans:
Look you guys, I gave you all the rope you needed to hang yourselves on healthcare reform, you took it all and demanded more. Well, there is no more. Consider yourselves hung. Your goal has nothing to do with reforming our broken healthcare system. Rather your goal is to make damn sure Democrats don't have a historic legislative success to campaign on in 2010 and 2012. So, we're done talking to you. If you want to vote for healthcare reform, we're going to give you a chance to do just that. If you want to vote against it, you'll have that chance too. Until then, don't call me, I'll call you .. but no time soon.
To Democrats:
“Okay gang, it's crunch time. This is one of those rare moments when every one of your constituents have their eyes focused on you like laser beams. Last November they didn't go to the polls to vote for Republican-lite. They voted for genuine change. And healthcare legislation that includes a strong “keep-em honest” public option is precisely the kind of change they sent you here to accomplish. So, let's get-er done.
Now, to you Blue Dogs; either get onboard fellas or else. Or else what, you ask? Hello boys, recognize me? I'm President of the United States of America. You're just a member of Congress. You represent one state. I represent the nation. So, don't be 'co-equal-ing' me. Go ahead, cross us on this one and I promise you, you'll live to regret it. Now, if you don't like it that way, fine. Change parties, or do a Lieberman. Otherwise get on board, get on now, or get the hell out of the way.
That's how Lyndon handled his anti-civil rights Dems. In fact, when one southern Democratic senator called Johnson to complain about the bill, Johnson turned the tables on him, telling he that he was not only going to vote for the bill, but that he needed to do more to show his support for civil rights. He told him to hold what we call today a town hall meeting back home and to make sure “you put a little black girl right there in the front row.”
“I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.” Lyndon Johnson
Cynical? Manipulative? You bet. But in that moral morass in Washington, it's also called “leadership.”
Now compare that with today's Democratic “leaders.” Here's Democratic Senate Leader, Harry Reid on his own “leadership” style:
“If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be—I’m sure—a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.” (Harry Reid)
Well Harry, we do. We hold grudges. Believe it Harry Plodder.
Same goes for you Barack. So, are you going to be our Lyndon Johnson? Or did we elect just another mediocre occupant of 1600 Penn Ave?
“It's the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done”
Lyndon Johnson
Profiles in Courage
On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, “Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want to be called black?” (One does not need to ask what he called African Americans before he learned to say “negra” instead.)
But he supported the Act, and he signed it into law, ending two centuries of American apartheid. And he did so at the greatest of all political risks:
“President Johnson realized that supporting this bill would risk losing the South's overwhelming support of the Democratic Party. Johnson told Robert Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen; "I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway." Senator Richard Russell, Jr. warned President Johnson that his strong support for the civil rights bill "will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election." The South indeed started to vote increasingly Republican after 1964.” (More)
And so it came to pass. The Dems did indeed lose the South -- and what of the South they held was only held by putting up for office closet Republicans masquerading as Democrats (AKA “Blue Dog Democrats.")
Over the decades that followed Johnson's personal profile in courage, Republicans gained ground. As the South went red it laid the foundation for Newt Gingrich Republican revolution. From that switch from blue to red flowed many awful things; Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, a conservative-leaning federal judiciary, the near-total destruction of America's once robust industrial base, the knee-capping of the American middle class, an illegal war, torture, financial collapse, and more.
So, did Lyndon Johnson really do the right thing?
Of course he did the right thing. Doing the right thing often means doing the hard thing... which is why doing the right thing is always such a rare and notable in event Washington. After all, if doing the right thing were risk-free and easy, they'd do it more often. Not always, of course, because there's those contributors they have tend to, but more often.
I only mention this because right now, this month and next month are President Barack Obama's Lyndon B. Johnson moment. He will either do the right thing, and go down in history alongside Johnson and Lincoln and FDR, or he won't.
In this case the right thing is for Obama to have a little chat with two groups:
First a chat with House and Senate Republicans:
Look you guys, I gave you all the rope you needed to hang yourselves on healthcare reform, you took it all and demanded more. Well, there is no more. Consider yourselves hung. Your goal has nothing to do with reforming our broken healthcare system. Rather your goal is to make damn sure Democrats don't have a historic legislative success to campaign on in 2010 and 2012. So, we're done talking to you. If you want to vote for healthcare reform, we're going to give you a chance to do just that. If you want to vote against it, you'll have that chance too. Until then, don't call me, I'll call you .. but no time soon.
To Democrats:
“Okay gang, it's crunch time. This is one of those rare moments when every one of your constituents have their eyes focused on you like laser beams. Last November they didn't go to the polls to vote for Republican-lite. They voted for genuine change. And healthcare legislation that includes a strong “keep-em honest” public option is precisely the kind of change they sent you here to accomplish. So, let's get-er done.
Now, to you Blue Dogs; either get onboard fellas or else. Or else what, you ask? Hello boys, recognize me? I'm President of the United States of America. You're just a member of Congress. You represent one state. I represent the nation. So, don't be 'co-equal-ing' me. Go ahead, cross us on this one and I promise you, you'll live to regret it. Now, if you don't like it that way, fine. Change parties, or do a Lieberman. Otherwise get on board, get on now, or get the hell out of the way.
That's how Lyndon handled his anti-civil rights Dems. In fact, when one southern Democratic senator called Johnson to complain about the bill, Johnson turned the tables on him, telling he that he was not only going to vote for the bill, but that he needed to do more to show his support for civil rights. He told him to hold what we call today a town hall meeting back home and to make sure “you put a little black girl right there in the front row.”
“I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.” Lyndon Johnson
Cynical? Manipulative? You bet. But in that moral morass in Washington, it's also called “leadership.”
Now compare that with today's Democratic “leaders.” Here's Democratic Senate Leader, Harry Reid on his own “leadership” style:
“If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be—I’m sure—a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.” (Harry Reid)
Well Harry, we do. We hold grudges. Believe it Harry Plodder.
Same goes for you Barack. So, are you going to be our Lyndon Johnson? Or did we elect just another mediocre occupant of 1600 Penn Ave?
“It's the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done”
Lyndon Johnson
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Hard to have a debate when only the shouters get attention
There are all kinds of things not to like about the proposed health care package winding its way through the senate. Really, a lot. Unfortunately, the dialog that is taking place pays not attention to them at all. Instead, we hear about "death panels", rationing and forcing people out of their current plans. As it turns out, the extreme rights reaction to health care reform is part of a pattern that goes back quite a way...
In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage
By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009
In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.
In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.
In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."
It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."
The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."
So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"
Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.
The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.
So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."
The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)
The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.
That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.
Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."
Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.
nixonland@live.com
Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus." He will be online to chat with readers Tuesday at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage
By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009
In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.
In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.
In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."
It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."
The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."
So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"
Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.
The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.
So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."
The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)
The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.
That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.
Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."
Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.
nixonland@live.com
Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus." He will be online to chat with readers Tuesday at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Morning cup of irony a tad bitter
I am finding that Twitter and Facebook consume enough of my spare cycles that I don't get around to blogging much anymore. Coupled with my desire to post about things not of a political nature and finding my muse wanting, it has been a little slow here. But leave it to the NRLC to poke me in just the right spot.
I find this issue particularly intriguing for a number of reasons. The foremost is that there are tremendous ways that the two sides could work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies and - in prinicipal - forward their states concerns. But there is something to this fight that is unsaid - on both sides.
Anyway, the NRLC is the most rigid in the prescription of their agenda...
The pro-life movement's contraception problem.
By William SaletanPosted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, at 7:58 AM ET
Does the nation's leading pro-life organization oppose contraception?
Officially, the National Right to Life Committee takes no position on birth control. Its legislative director, Douglas Johnson, has restated this neutrality many times. I'm inclined to believe him, because I take people's stated motivations seriously.
Johnson, however, doesn't take such statements seriously. He relentlessly characterizes his opponents as "pro-abortion," even though they don't like abortions. They call themselves pro-choice or pro-abortion rights. But Johnson insists on an objective standard: Do you support legislation that funds abortions or people who defend them? If so, you're pro-abortion.
By this standard, NRLC is against contraception.
Johnson's latest targets are Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Rachel Laser, director of the culture program at Third Way. Together with Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., Ryan and Laser have assembled a coalition of pro-choicers and pro-lifers to promote the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act. The bill includes contraceptive and sex education funding, abstinence-friendly curriculum, a bigger adoption tax credit, and financial support for women who continue their pregnancies.
Ryan claims to be pro-life. Laser, who is pro-choice, claims to share Ryan's interest in reducing the number of abortions. Johnson rejects both claims. In a comment posted in Slate's Fray last Wednesday, Johnson repeats that Laser is "pro-abortion" and that she is now using "false flag operations," serving "the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby, with a methodology that employs misleading rhetoric, labels, and props intended to disguise the substance of that agenda," thereby providing "camouflage for the pro-abortion politicians." He dismisses the Ryan-DeLauro bill and its themes of abortion reduction and common ground as "phony," a "smokescreen," and a "prop" in a "political charade." He calls Ryan a "front man" for this pro-abortion scheme and accuses him of voting "against all the real pro-lifers."
In short, he calls them liars. Their true motives, Johnson argues, can be discerned from objective evidence:
Why did Third Way sponsor a "common ground" press conference on Capitol Hill on July 23? Ostensibly to promote the Ryan-DeLauro "abortion reduction" bill, but really, for the primary purpose of furthering the abortion lobby's attempts to undercut efforts by bona fide pro-life members of the House … to amend the Obama-backed health care legislation to prevent subsidies and mandates for abortion. … On July 21, two days before the Third Way "common ground" press conference, Ryan sent a public letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposing a "common ground" compromise on abortion in the health care legislation. … under the Ryan-Pelosi-Waxman scheme, the huge new federal subsidies would flow to health plans that fund elective abortions.
I'll give Johnson the benefit of the doubt and assume he genuinely believes that the press conference was scheduled to facilitate the health-care compromise Ryan floated in his July 21 letter. He's wrong. The press conference was scheduled before the letter was written. The bill and the press conference were going forward regardless of what Ryan did or didn't do in the health-care fight. I know this because I know where things stood on July 20. Johnson may not want to believe the bill's architects are sincere, but they are.
So Johnson's characterizations of Ryan's and Laser's motives aren't merely uncharitable. Objectively, insofar as they're based on the legislative timeline, they're false. So is Johnson's description of Laser's employer: "Third Way is devoted to advancing and consolidating the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby." Hoo boy. I don't know which side would laugh harder at that line—Third Way or the pro-choice groups. Let's just say they didn't exactly see eye to eye on Ryan-DeLauro.
Johnson's critique is also incoherent. While dismissing Laser as a "career pro-abortion activist" prior to her current job, he spurns Ryan as fake pro-lifer because, after standing with NRLC on 80 percent of scored votes through 2006, the congressman began voting the wrong way. In other words, Johnson thinks that around three years ago, Laser's record became fake and Ryan's became real. You just have to ignore everything Ryan did before that moment and everything Laser did afterward.
But what about Johnson's record? If we apply his method of evaluating motives, what can we conclude about the agenda of the National Right to Life Committee?
Johnson says Ryan "did not cast a single pro-life vote in 2007, 2008, or 2009." As evidence, he invites Slate readers to look up Ryan's scorecard on the NRLC Web site. Let's do that.
From 2003 to 2006, the scorecard lists 22 key House votes. On these, it shows Ryan voting with NRLC 17 times, voting against it 4 times, and not voting once. Three of the four votes on which Ryan split with NRLC involved contraception, stem cells, or cost controls on prescription drugs. Of the 22 roll calls scored, 15 were directly about abortion. On these, Ryan voted with NRLC all but once.
From 2007 to 2009, NRLC scored only 10 votes. Four of the first five were on stem cells or cloning. On these, Ryan voted against NRLC twice, and the other two times, he didn't vote. Lots of other anti-abortion legislators, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, vote for stem cells and cloning, and NRLC doesn't call them fakers, so those two votes don't explain why NRLC has denounced Ryan. The fifth vote on the NRLC scorecard was on the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act. NRLC says this vote was a pro-life test because "the bill would result in the imposition of price controls that would limit access to and discourage the development of innovative life-saving medicines."
At this point, we've gone through half the votes NRLC scored since 2007. None of them was on abortion.
Let's try the next one. Here's NRLC summary:
Under President Bush's pro-life "Mexico City Policy," private overseas organizations that "perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" are not eligible to receive funds under the U.S. foreign aid program for "population assistance." The Fiscal Year 2008 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill (H.R. 2764) contained language … requiring the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide such pro-abortion organizations with certain U.S.-funded contraceptive supplies. Pro-life Representatives … offered an amendment, which was strongly supported by NRLC, to remove the pro-abortion language from the bill, but the amendment failed, 205 to 218.
Ryan flunked this test. He voted, in NRLC's words, to provide "U.S.-funded contraceptive supplies."
The next scored vote came a month later. According to the scorecard:
Title X ("Title 10") of the Public Health Service Act provides more than $300 million annually for grants to state and private entities for "family planning" programs. Although federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions, large amounts of Title X funds go to organizations that operate abortion clinics, including affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation's largest abortion provider. On July 19, 2007, during consideration of the Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations bill for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, pro-life Congressman Mike Pence (R-In.) offered an amendment to prohibit any Title X funds from going to any arm of Planned Parenthood. The amendment did not reduce the amount of money appropriated for Title X overall.
Again, Ryan flunked. He voted to keep Planned Parenthood eligible for family-planning grants based on the premise, acknowledged by NRLC, that "federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions."
The next vote was on the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. NRLC explains:
The bill contained a section to establish an Office for Global Women's Issues, headed by an ambassador-at-large who will report directly to Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. Given the clear evidence that the Obama Administration State Department is determined to campaign for abortion, NRLC informed House members that NRLC opposed the bill, unless the House added an amendment proposed by Congressman Smith to prohibit the office from engaging in activities to change foreign abortion laws. However, the House Rules Committee—which is an arm of the leadership of the Democratic majority that controls the House—refused to allow the House to vote on the Smith Amendment, so NRLC opposed passage of the bill.
Again, Ryan flunked. He voted to fund the State Department, even though the secretary of state favored abortion rights.
So far, we've been through eight of NRLC's 10 scored votes for the last three years. They've been on stem cells, drug price controls, contraception, and funding the State Department. Not until two weeks ago did NRLC finally score a vote that was directly on abortion. Here's NRLC's description:
The District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction which, under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, is completely under the legislative authority of Congress. Therefore, the entire budget for D.C. (including locally generated revenues) is appropriated by Congress as part of the annual "Financial Services appropriations bill." … in 2009, at the urging of the Obama White House, the House Appropriations Committee inserted new language in the bill to allow the D.C. city government to use locally generated (but congressionally appropriated) funds for abortion on demand. The House Democratic majority leadership did not allow the full House of Representatives to vote on an amendment to restore the traditional pro-life provision. Thus, NRLC opposed passage of the bill …
Ryan voted to let the D.C. budget go through because, as he put it, "Congress shouldn't tell the District of Columbia that it can't use its own money to fund abortions." NRLC's position is that there's no such thing as D.C.'s own money, since even the District's "locally generated revenues" are "appropriated by Congress." That's a defensible position. But while invoking this bookkeeping technicality, NRLC rejects such technicalities in the case of Planned Parenthood. Money for contraception? Money for abortion? In NRLC's view, it's all the same thing, no matter what the law says. Based on this view, NRLC flunked Ryan one more time on July 24, when he voted to let Planned Parenthood receive family-planning grants, again with the understanding that "federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions."
Those are the 10 votes NRLC has scored since 2007. Of the first five, four were on stem cells; the other was on drug price controls. Of the most recent five, one was on abortion funding, another was on State Department appropriations, and three were on contraception. Compare this to 2003-2006, when 15 of the 22 votes scored by NRLC were directly on abortion, and Ryan's record on those 15 votes was nearly perfect. In 2007, Ryan began to flunk the scorecard because the scorecard was no longer primarily about abortion. It wasn't Ryan who changed. It was NRLC.
The same can be said of Democrats for Life of America. As evidence that Ryan isn't a "real" pro-lifer, Johnson points out that DFLA "kicked Ryan off their advisory board last year -- and no, it wasn't because he supports contraception." Really? Let's check the record. In an article posted at Catholic Online on July 16, DFLA Executive Director Kristen Day explained Ryan's ouster this way:
[I]n the last year or so Congressman Ryan's voting record has become more and more pro-abortion. After his last vote in favor of taxpayer funded abortions, his credibility as a pro-life legislator has crumbled with the national pro-life community. These developments forced DFLA to quietly remove Congressman Ryan from the National Advisory Board last year.
Last year. That was 2008—before the vote on D.C. appropriations. The only funding votes Ryan had flunked at that point were on contraception. DFLA excommunicated Ryan for the same reason NRLC did: He disagreed with them on birth control.
I'd like to think NRLC and DFLA are anti-abortion, not anti-contraception. But when I look at them as Johnson would, ignoring their stated motives and focusing instead on their records, I can't really defend them.
I find this issue particularly intriguing for a number of reasons. The foremost is that there are tremendous ways that the two sides could work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies and - in prinicipal - forward their states concerns. But there is something to this fight that is unsaid - on both sides.
Anyway, the NRLC is the most rigid in the prescription of their agenda...
The pro-life movement's contraception problem.
By William SaletanPosted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, at 7:58 AM ET
Does the nation's leading pro-life organization oppose contraception?
Officially, the National Right to Life Committee takes no position on birth control. Its legislative director, Douglas Johnson, has restated this neutrality many times. I'm inclined to believe him, because I take people's stated motivations seriously.
Johnson, however, doesn't take such statements seriously. He relentlessly characterizes his opponents as "pro-abortion," even though they don't like abortions. They call themselves pro-choice or pro-abortion rights. But Johnson insists on an objective standard: Do you support legislation that funds abortions or people who defend them? If so, you're pro-abortion.
By this standard, NRLC is against contraception.
Johnson's latest targets are Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Rachel Laser, director of the culture program at Third Way. Together with Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., Ryan and Laser have assembled a coalition of pro-choicers and pro-lifers to promote the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act. The bill includes contraceptive and sex education funding, abstinence-friendly curriculum, a bigger adoption tax credit, and financial support for women who continue their pregnancies.
Ryan claims to be pro-life. Laser, who is pro-choice, claims to share Ryan's interest in reducing the number of abortions. Johnson rejects both claims. In a comment posted in Slate's Fray last Wednesday, Johnson repeats that Laser is "pro-abortion" and that she is now using "false flag operations," serving "the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby, with a methodology that employs misleading rhetoric, labels, and props intended to disguise the substance of that agenda," thereby providing "camouflage for the pro-abortion politicians." He dismisses the Ryan-DeLauro bill and its themes of abortion reduction and common ground as "phony," a "smokescreen," and a "prop" in a "political charade." He calls Ryan a "front man" for this pro-abortion scheme and accuses him of voting "against all the real pro-lifers."
In short, he calls them liars. Their true motives, Johnson argues, can be discerned from objective evidence:
Why did Third Way sponsor a "common ground" press conference on Capitol Hill on July 23? Ostensibly to promote the Ryan-DeLauro "abortion reduction" bill, but really, for the primary purpose of furthering the abortion lobby's attempts to undercut efforts by bona fide pro-life members of the House … to amend the Obama-backed health care legislation to prevent subsidies and mandates for abortion. … On July 21, two days before the Third Way "common ground" press conference, Ryan sent a public letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposing a "common ground" compromise on abortion in the health care legislation. … under the Ryan-Pelosi-Waxman scheme, the huge new federal subsidies would flow to health plans that fund elective abortions.
I'll give Johnson the benefit of the doubt and assume he genuinely believes that the press conference was scheduled to facilitate the health-care compromise Ryan floated in his July 21 letter. He's wrong. The press conference was scheduled before the letter was written. The bill and the press conference were going forward regardless of what Ryan did or didn't do in the health-care fight. I know this because I know where things stood on July 20. Johnson may not want to believe the bill's architects are sincere, but they are.
So Johnson's characterizations of Ryan's and Laser's motives aren't merely uncharitable. Objectively, insofar as they're based on the legislative timeline, they're false. So is Johnson's description of Laser's employer: "Third Way is devoted to advancing and consolidating the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby." Hoo boy. I don't know which side would laugh harder at that line—Third Way or the pro-choice groups. Let's just say they didn't exactly see eye to eye on Ryan-DeLauro.
Johnson's critique is also incoherent. While dismissing Laser as a "career pro-abortion activist" prior to her current job, he spurns Ryan as fake pro-lifer because, after standing with NRLC on 80 percent of scored votes through 2006, the congressman began voting the wrong way. In other words, Johnson thinks that around three years ago, Laser's record became fake and Ryan's became real. You just have to ignore everything Ryan did before that moment and everything Laser did afterward.
But what about Johnson's record? If we apply his method of evaluating motives, what can we conclude about the agenda of the National Right to Life Committee?
Johnson says Ryan "did not cast a single pro-life vote in 2007, 2008, or 2009." As evidence, he invites Slate readers to look up Ryan's scorecard on the NRLC Web site. Let's do that.
From 2003 to 2006, the scorecard lists 22 key House votes. On these, it shows Ryan voting with NRLC 17 times, voting against it 4 times, and not voting once. Three of the four votes on which Ryan split with NRLC involved contraception, stem cells, or cost controls on prescription drugs. Of the 22 roll calls scored, 15 were directly about abortion. On these, Ryan voted with NRLC all but once.
From 2007 to 2009, NRLC scored only 10 votes. Four of the first five were on stem cells or cloning. On these, Ryan voted against NRLC twice, and the other two times, he didn't vote. Lots of other anti-abortion legislators, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, vote for stem cells and cloning, and NRLC doesn't call them fakers, so those two votes don't explain why NRLC has denounced Ryan. The fifth vote on the NRLC scorecard was on the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act. NRLC says this vote was a pro-life test because "the bill would result in the imposition of price controls that would limit access to and discourage the development of innovative life-saving medicines."
At this point, we've gone through half the votes NRLC scored since 2007. None of them was on abortion.
Let's try the next one. Here's NRLC summary:
Under President Bush's pro-life "Mexico City Policy," private overseas organizations that "perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" are not eligible to receive funds under the U.S. foreign aid program for "population assistance." The Fiscal Year 2008 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill (H.R. 2764) contained language … requiring the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide such pro-abortion organizations with certain U.S.-funded contraceptive supplies. Pro-life Representatives … offered an amendment, which was strongly supported by NRLC, to remove the pro-abortion language from the bill, but the amendment failed, 205 to 218.
Ryan flunked this test. He voted, in NRLC's words, to provide "U.S.-funded contraceptive supplies."
The next scored vote came a month later. According to the scorecard:
Title X ("Title 10") of the Public Health Service Act provides more than $300 million annually for grants to state and private entities for "family planning" programs. Although federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions, large amounts of Title X funds go to organizations that operate abortion clinics, including affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation's largest abortion provider. On July 19, 2007, during consideration of the Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations bill for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, pro-life Congressman Mike Pence (R-In.) offered an amendment to prohibit any Title X funds from going to any arm of Planned Parenthood. The amendment did not reduce the amount of money appropriated for Title X overall.
Again, Ryan flunked. He voted to keep Planned Parenthood eligible for family-planning grants based on the premise, acknowledged by NRLC, that "federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions."
The next vote was on the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. NRLC explains:
The bill contained a section to establish an Office for Global Women's Issues, headed by an ambassador-at-large who will report directly to Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. Given the clear evidence that the Obama Administration State Department is determined to campaign for abortion, NRLC informed House members that NRLC opposed the bill, unless the House added an amendment proposed by Congressman Smith to prohibit the office from engaging in activities to change foreign abortion laws. However, the House Rules Committee—which is an arm of the leadership of the Democratic majority that controls the House—refused to allow the House to vote on the Smith Amendment, so NRLC opposed passage of the bill.
Again, Ryan flunked. He voted to fund the State Department, even though the secretary of state favored abortion rights.
So far, we've been through eight of NRLC's 10 scored votes for the last three years. They've been on stem cells, drug price controls, contraception, and funding the State Department. Not until two weeks ago did NRLC finally score a vote that was directly on abortion. Here's NRLC's description:
The District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction which, under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, is completely under the legislative authority of Congress. Therefore, the entire budget for D.C. (including locally generated revenues) is appropriated by Congress as part of the annual "Financial Services appropriations bill." … in 2009, at the urging of the Obama White House, the House Appropriations Committee inserted new language in the bill to allow the D.C. city government to use locally generated (but congressionally appropriated) funds for abortion on demand. The House Democratic majority leadership did not allow the full House of Representatives to vote on an amendment to restore the traditional pro-life provision. Thus, NRLC opposed passage of the bill …
Ryan voted to let the D.C. budget go through because, as he put it, "Congress shouldn't tell the District of Columbia that it can't use its own money to fund abortions." NRLC's position is that there's no such thing as D.C.'s own money, since even the District's "locally generated revenues" are "appropriated by Congress." That's a defensible position. But while invoking this bookkeeping technicality, NRLC rejects such technicalities in the case of Planned Parenthood. Money for contraception? Money for abortion? In NRLC's view, it's all the same thing, no matter what the law says. Based on this view, NRLC flunked Ryan one more time on July 24, when he voted to let Planned Parenthood receive family-planning grants, again with the understanding that "federal law does not permit such funds to be used to pay for abortions."
Those are the 10 votes NRLC has scored since 2007. Of the first five, four were on stem cells; the other was on drug price controls. Of the most recent five, one was on abortion funding, another was on State Department appropriations, and three were on contraception. Compare this to 2003-2006, when 15 of the 22 votes scored by NRLC were directly on abortion, and Ryan's record on those 15 votes was nearly perfect. In 2007, Ryan began to flunk the scorecard because the scorecard was no longer primarily about abortion. It wasn't Ryan who changed. It was NRLC.
The same can be said of Democrats for Life of America. As evidence that Ryan isn't a "real" pro-lifer, Johnson points out that DFLA "kicked Ryan off their advisory board last year -- and no, it wasn't because he supports contraception." Really? Let's check the record. In an article posted at Catholic Online on July 16, DFLA Executive Director Kristen Day explained Ryan's ouster this way:
[I]n the last year or so Congressman Ryan's voting record has become more and more pro-abortion. After his last vote in favor of taxpayer funded abortions, his credibility as a pro-life legislator has crumbled with the national pro-life community. These developments forced DFLA to quietly remove Congressman Ryan from the National Advisory Board last year.
Last year. That was 2008—before the vote on D.C. appropriations. The only funding votes Ryan had flunked at that point were on contraception. DFLA excommunicated Ryan for the same reason NRLC did: He disagreed with them on birth control.
I'd like to think NRLC and DFLA are anti-abortion, not anti-contraception. But when I look at them as Johnson would, ignoring their stated motives and focusing instead on their records, I can't really defend them.
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