Like a lot of writers, I have a Facebook page where I post articles that I’ve published. Over the past year or two, I’ve accumulated a few hundred followers--that is, Facebook friends--and, based upon the comments they leave, they tend to see the world the same way that I do. They’re left of center, by and large, and they believe fervently in health care reform.
President Obama got a lot of attention for the letter he sent Congress on Tuesday. But a leader of the House Democrats made some news, too.
An article that ran in Politico on Friday provided a Rorschach test for those of us following the health care reform debate.
You’ve got to hand it to Bristol Palin: The gal is working overtime to turn those lemons into lemonade.
President Obama is making good on his pledge, first put forth in the State of the Union, to reach out to Republicans on health care reform.
In a CBS News interview with Katie Couric that just aired, Obama announced that he's inviting Republican leaders to the White House this week to put their ideas on the table--and then holding a public forum to discuss them.
IN EARLY 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America's greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch).
God, I miss the good old days of the Super Bowl, when the hottest controversy was the post-game hand-wringing over how to spank CBS for subjecting America to Janet Jackson’s right boob.
Republicans take great offense whenever anybody accuses them of favoring George W. Bush's policies or being the "Party of No." But it's hard to avoid that conclusion when they say things like this:
Per Andrew, it's pretty incredible that CBS, which is airing an anti-abortion ad, refuses to air this funny ad for a gay dating site:
Peter Wehner, the former aide to Karl Rove and Minister of Propaganda for the Bush administration, likes a good feud as much as I do, and since I’ve been poking fun at him sporadically for months, I’ve been eagerly awaiting his response. It has finally arrived, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, another favorite punching bag of mine, has deemed the occasion sufficiently exciting to warrant an extended editorial page excerpt. I mention this lest anybody accuse me of running up the score by beating up on an obscure, hapless foe.
Wehner begins by quoting a column I wrote after the 2008 elections:
In the afterglow of Barack Obama’s election, liberals were peddling a lot of bad ideas. Among them was the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who in December 2008 wrote this:
"The practical import of the Obama mandate debate has fallen on the question of whether he should pursue his goal of comprehensive health care reform, which numerous pundits and even some Democrats have tagged as dangerously ambitious. But this is one area where undiluted liberalism enjoys overwhelming public support. The public, by a roughly two-to-one margin, thinks the government has a responsibility to make sure that every American has adequate health care. Congressional Democrats fear a repeat of 1994–when, as they see it, Bill Clinton over-interpreted his mandate and therefore failed to pass health care reform. This reading has it backward. Clinton’s health care plan failed because Congress decided he didn’t have a mandate and refused to pass it. If the Democrats fail this time, it will probably be because they psyched themselves out once again."
Thirteen months later, Chait’s “undiluted liberalism” enjoys something less than overwhelming public support. In fact, the United States has become more, not less, conservative during the Obama presidency (by a margin of 2-to-1, Americans describe themselves as conservative rather than liberal). And Obama and the Democrats, having followed Chait’s counsel, find themselves in a terrible political ditch.
What follows is a lengthy gloat-fest about the various Republican political triumphs that have ensued. If you think I’m leaving anything of substance out of Wehner’s argument, please go read the entire thing. It’s quite baffling. I wrote that, in the fall of 2008, the one question upon which Obama was being urged to scale back in order to align himself with public opinion – his goal of providing universal coverage – was a question upon which he enjoyed strong majority support. And it did.
I am failing to understand how reciting a litany of Republican triumphs over the last year is supposed to show that this is ridiculous. Wehner is not just providing a wrong answer, he’s providing a wrong genre of answer.
Since Wehner appears unable to make anything resembling an argument, I’ll make his argument for him, just to be sporting. As it happens, the proportion of Americans who say it’s the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans have health coverage, which was at 2-to-1 when I wrote that column, has dropped precipitously since, to the point where it's now even. Now, in response to me making Wehner’s case for him, I’d point out that other polls show much higher level of support for universal coverage. This CBS poll shows the public, by a 25-point margin, thinking the Democratic health care bills either get it right on covering more Americans or don’t go far enough.
In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock).
I've just read the transcript of the president's remarks about Haiti, the ones he made on January 15. He noted that, in addition to assistance from the United States, significant aid had also come from "Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others." Am I missing another country that truly weighed in with truly consequential assistance? Ah, yes.
At long last our national nightmare is over: Jay Leno is headed back to his spot atop “The Tonight Show,” and Conan O’Brien—more adorably known these days as Coco—has left the building with his gazillion-dollar consolation prize, quite possibly to set up shop at Fox.
Who needs Simon Cowell when your daddy wins himself a Senate seat and becomes the hot new hope of the GOP?
This press alert just in from CBS: Ayla Brown, former American Idol contestant and daughter of Massachusetts political phenom Scott Brown, will demonstrate her vocal stylings "exclusively" on The Early Show next Tuesday.
How cute is that?
Anderson Cooper was one of the first reporters to arrive in Haiti after last week’s massive earthquake. According to a Los Angeles Times account, the CNN personality raced to the airport upon hearing the news and caught the last flight out of New York. Unfortunately, the flight he caught deposited him in the Dominican Republic, not Haiti.
Charles Krauthammer! The winning entry is Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post, which spends roughly 700 words gloating over the decline in Obama's poll ratings as a function of his wild liberalism, without a single reference to unemployment:
And Showtime is about to present, in a ten-part miniseries, Oliver Stone’s “Secret History of America.” Don’t you wonder why, if Stone (and Michael Moore, for that matter) is right about the evils of capitalism, an enormous capitalist corporation has produced--and will now show--what is, almost by self-advertisement, a nutcase reconstruction of the American past, focusing on its enemies, who he seems to think have been traduced by historians?
Another funny aspect of that bizarre Commentary piece by Jennifer Rubin castigating Jews for spurning Sarah Palin is its timing. The article, naturally, contends that Palin is far more intellectual and informed about politics than the Jews understand:
Just when you thought reality TV couldn't get any ickier, WaPo's Lisa de Moraes tells us that the CW network is trolling for women (translation: hot, 20-something women) with a range of mental illnesses sufficiently entertaining to sustain a reality series. Think: anorexia, bulimia, rage issues, shopping addiction, and--the holy grail--sex addiction.
On Sunday morning, Senator Joe Lieberman announced on CBS "Face the Nation" that he would "have a hard time voting for" a reform bill if it allowed some workers over 55 to buy Medicare coverage. Later, in a private meeting with Majority Leader Harry Reid, Lieberman delivered an even stronger message.
According to two Senate sources briefed on the discussion, Lieberman indicated he was prepared to filibuster health care reform--that is, not merely vote against it but block a vote on it altogether--if it included the Medicare buy-in.
Whether this was a surprise, or should have been, is a matter of some dispute. More than a week ago, while the so-called Gang of Ten was still hammering out a compromise over the public option, Lieberman and Reid met. At that time, according to one senior Senate aide, "Lieberman told Reid personally he could support the Medicare buy-in."
The statement Lieberman released after the Gang of Ten announced its compromise seemed consistent with such sentiments. In it, Lieberman expressed concern about the measure but, pointedly, did not reject it outright:
Regarding the "Medicare buy-in" proposal that is being discussed, we must remain vigilant about protecting and extending the solvency of the program, which isnow in a perilous financial condition.
It is my understanding at this point there is no legislative language so I look forward to analyzing the details of the plan and reviewing analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.
But Lieberman communications director Marshall Wittmann, reached on Sunday night, said that Lieberman had expressed the same "serious misgivings" all along. As for Lieberman's current position--and what he told Reid privately--Wittman said, "The Senator does not believe that the Medicare buy in or the public option should be in the bill."
Whatever Lieberman conveyed to Reid, and when, these latest statements make the prospects for including the Medicare buy-in awfully slim. And that's a shame.
WASHINGTON--President Obama has bought himself some time on Afghanistan and lived up to his promise to seek policies that fit into no one's philosophical pigeonholes. He has also split his own party, diminished the enthusiasm of his natural allies, yet earned himself no lasting credit with his domestic adversaries.
By these measures, Obama's surge-and-wind-down strategy is both gutsy and politically risky.
No matter what you think of it, the kind of troop increase that President Obama announced tonight is going to be expensive. With an estimated $1 billion dollar price tag for each additional thousand troops deployed, the new strategy will drive costs well above the $130 billion originally budgeted by the administration for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2010, likely requiring a supplemental spending bill to pass sometime early next year. You can expect the fight over that bill to get nasty.
The Wall Street Journal has an entertaining piece today about the president's increasing love of golf, apparently at the expense of his hoops-playing:
It's all over the news today that Oprah Winfrey will end her syndicated talk show in 2011, after 25 seasons.
No need for women--or the book publishing industry--to panic. The assumption is that Oprah will move some version of her gab fest to, or at least make frequent appearance on, her soon-to-be-launched, modestly named cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (aka OWN).
I was pretty shocked by this new poll that found that 52 percent of Republican voters think ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Obama. I wanted to get some perspective, though, so I looked for polls that assessed voters' feelings about the 2000 elections. I figured that, even with hanging chads and all, fewer Democratic voters would have considered Bush illegitimate back then than those Republicans who now feel that way about Obama.
