The self-declared mission of J Street, the dovish "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" lobby that just concluded its first national conference this week, includes redefining the meaning of the term "pro-Israel." For too long, the organization's founders and supporters argue, right-wing elements in the Jewish community have abused the term to hijack the debate and tarnish mainstream, sensible advocates of a two-state solution.
Per today's Wall Street Journal, Chamber of Commerce CEO Ton Donohue, whose organization backs the idea that significant global warming "would, on balance, be beneficial to humans" because the number of cold-weather deaths it would eliminate is "several times larger than the increase in summertime heat stress-related [deaths]," had this to say about the group's position on the issue:
Standish, Michigan
It's two p.m. on a workday, and the casino parking lot is completely full. Hundreds of people have come for the $20 gambling coupons offered to those willing to donate blood. Turnout for the drive was "above and beyond" expectations, says Frank Cloutier, a spokesman for the Saginaw Chippewa Indians, who run the 800-slot complex. The nurses are already turning people away two hours before closing, and they will soon run out of blood bags.
It's bad enough that, if current trends continue, the GOP is likely to lose what should be a
gimme congressional seat in New York's 23rd district next month thanks to a conservative spoiler candidate. Now sparks are flying between the moderate GOP nominee, Dede Scozzafava, and The Weekly Standard, which backs Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman. Attending an event in Lowville, NY, the Standard's John McCormack reports:
After a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, Scozzafava fended off criticism that she wasn't as conservative as third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and urged her supporters to vote for her in order to keep her Democratic opponent Bill Owens from serving as a rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama's agenda in Washington. It was a fairly typical evening--until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava's campaign called the police. On me.
The two sides paint somewhat different pictures of the events that led to the police being called, of course:
As Obama's health care overhaul comes closer and closer to becoming a reality, Republicans have begun to accuse Democrats of sabotaging the very process of making the bill into a law. Mike Enzi--the ranking Republican member of the Senate HELP Committee--has accused the Democratic HELP staff of substantially altering the HELP bill as the plan was translated into its final legislative text, which was sent to the Senate floor last month. According to Enzi spokesman Michael Mahaffey, “there are 75 separate instances where they unilaterally overturned committee votes and member agreements.” He told me last week that the Wyoming Senator was “outraged” by the alleged discrepancies and brought them to the attention of HELP’s Democratic leadership, but failed to get a real response to his concerns.
What are the differences between the bills, according to Enzi? For one, Enzi says that one amendment passed unanimously by the committee was gutted--a wellness measure that would allow private insurance companies to lower premiums up to 30 percent for participants who compiled with healthy lifestyle changes. Other provisions Enzi says have changed include a requirement of parental consent for minors to receive treatment at school health centers and a student loan provision that tied financial aid to work in underserved communities. Enzi’s staffers “went line-by-line” through the bill detailing all the changes, which the Republican side was never consulted about or informed of, according to Mahaffey. “No member of the Senate should have to request that a reported bill have the same provisions as the bill that was voted on in committee,” he wrote in an email. “That’s basic Senate rule and procedure, and it was violated.”
Since late summer, several states have passed into law resolutions to release thousands of prisoners before they've completed their sentences. The goal is to help make up for immense budget shortfalls. The states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and Oregon, have targeted their bloated prison systems in their quest to save hundreds of millions and make up for immense budget shortfalls. (Some have balanced budget amendments that require them to work out immediate savings.) But how exactly would such a plan work? With former prisoners hitting the streets this month in several states, we though it would be helpful to explain just what you need to know:
Who is eligible for early release?
While the specifics may vary from state to state, the eligible inmates are those who are deemed “low risk." Typically, this means non-violent or non-person offenders, petty thieves, drug offenders, or those who are medically incapacitated.
In Colorado, for instance, “low-risk” applies to prisoners who are within six months of their mandatory release dates. According to Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, releasing "low-risk" inmates could be dangerous. “If you have six months to go before mandatory release date, one of two things has happened--neither of which are good for public safety," explained Suthers, who also used to be the director of Colorado's prison system. "One, you’ve been passed over for discretionary parole because you’ve been deemed a risk. Or, two, you’ve waived discretionary parole because you don’t think you have a chance. So this group of inmates we’re talking about is a relatively high risk one.”
In recent months, we've seen a host of companies protest the Chamber of Commerce's stance on global warming by either speaking out or resigning: Apple, Nike, GE, Johnson & Johnson, three electric utilities... The Chamber, in turn, has pointed out that the vast majority of its three million members haven't defected. Fair enough, but that raises a question: How did the Chamber's climate policy get decided in the first place? Was it a transparent, open process, and Apple and Nike are just sore losers? Nope.
Arthur Miller
By Christopher Bigsby
(Harvard University Press, 739 pp., $35)
I.
Arthur Miller could hardly have hoped for a more sympathetic biographer than Christopher Bigsby. He is the director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the author of a long commentary on Miller’s work and a book-length interview with the playwright. To write this biography, Miller granted Bigsby exclusive access to his papers, including unpublished manuscripts, and sat for what Bigsby describes as “many hours of interviews” over a twenty-five-year friendship.
The WSJ says that Gates has fresh doubts about the prospects of a major counterinsurgency campaign. But his spokesman, Geoff Morell, says he's also dubious about Joe Biden-backed the counterterrorism approach. Gates "does not think that is a path to success in Afghanistan," Morell tells the Journal. It's not clear what to make of this, as I'd be surprised if Gates endorsed a halfway muddle-through strategy.
Over the last few weeks Jay Rockefeller has emerged as the Senate's most visible spokesman for a public insurance option. And, purely from a public relations standpoint, this is something of a mixed blessing. He comes from West Virginia and is pretty popular there, so that certainly helps bring non-coastal credibility to the cause. But Rockefeller speaks in a plodding, rambling style that doesn't always make for great television. He's also pretty stubborn, which makes him a loud advocate but not necessarily an effective one, at least given the way the U.S. Senate works.
But Rockefeller gets something better than almost anybody I've seen--something he's expressed in interviews and, most recently, during this weeks hearings of the Senate Finance Committee. It's how everyday people, particularly those without a lot of money, interact with the health care system. It's easy to treat health care as an abstraction--to make it all about economic theories and Congressional Budget Office projections. (I'm surely guilty of this myself.) Rockefeller sees it through the eyes of West Virginians making $30,000 a year--people who just want to know they can pay their premiums and that, if they do, the insurance they get will protect them when they get sick.
A week and a half ago, the Capital exploded in vaguely anti-government sentiment. Tuesday was supposed to be the anti-Glenn Beck crowd's rejoinder: 150 health care rallies around the country, sounding a clarion call for the public option. In Washington, a band of about 20 activists gathered on a barren strip of Pennsylvania Avenue while the occasional passerby scuttled past, probably late to lunch.
"We are fired up! We are ready to go!" an organizer yelled, as if trying to convince herself. Armed with a portable amp and flanked by a squad of white-haired oldies in hospital smocks and attachable fake rear ends--"Chances are your ass ain't covered!", their placards read--the little group paraded up to a faceless building where the American Heath Insurance Plans coalition is headquartered.
"It's these big insurance industries that are really in the way," said one of the smocked "patients," Danielle Greene, who wanted a single-payer system but was willing to settle for a public option in the interim. She said they'd gotten the taxi drivers on board with the cause, and many indeed honked as they drove by--though it could have been more out of fare-seeking than solidarity.
But the public optioners weren't alone. FreedomWorks, the group behind the 9/12 conflagration, had sent down some staff and interns to shift the message slightly: still protesting big insurance, but from a free-market perspective. "Choice Not Force!" blared their poster boards, mingled in with signs reading "Health Care NOW!" A spokesman, Max Pappas, said he had calculated that the Baucus bill would amount to $463 billion in subsidies to the industry over ten years.
Earlier this month, Barack Obama apparently completed an anti-free-market trifecta, adding "protectionist" to a rap sheet that already included "deficit spender" and "serial nationalizer." And not just any protectionist, mind you. In the words of former Bush spokesman Tony Fratto, Obama will hereafter be known as "the president who ‘lost' trade for America." The following day, the Wall Street Journal editorial page elaborated: "America now has its first protectionist President since Herbert Hoover."
After much anticipation of this week's meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, early reports indicate that President Obama spent most of his time "sternly urging Israeli and Palestinian leaders to do more to make Mideast peace talks possible." It's an unimpressive message from a president that has been urging the sides "to do more" for quite a while now, to no avail. Israel has refused the "total settlement freeze" that U.S. officials were demanding, Palestinians have rebuffed all attempts to bring them back to the negotiating table, and Arab leaders have shown no real interest in contributing "gestures" to move the process along.
In some ways, Obama repeated today some of the mistakes that have spoiled his efforts thus far. For no obvious reason--and clearly irritated by both Netanyahu and Abbas--the president had summoned the sides to this mini-summit and lectured them like rebellious children. No statement was agreed on, so he made one on his own. He demanded final status negotiations, despite the Israeli government's belief that interim agreements and gradual progress better fit the current situation. He showed little sympathy for Abbas' reluctance to negotiate, despite the fact that Abbas couldn't even attend this meaningless meeting without being subjected to a barrage of criticism at home. (The best advice may have come from a Hamas spokesman I heard on Israeli radio this week, who suggested that Abbas meet with the group's leader, Khalid Mishal, to stem the internal Palestinian conflict before even thinking about peace with Israel.)
The conservative echo chamber continues to play "telephone" with its estimates of the crowds at the 9/12 protest. Follow along:
1) On his radio show yesterday, Glenn Beck claimed that the London Telegraph "quote[d] a source from the Park Service, the National Park Service, saying that it is the largest march on Washington ever."
I suppose it's good that the Swat Valley Taliban spokesman has been captured, but I have to question the wisdom of luring in people under the guise of negotiations and then snatching them. If we really are serious about trying to cut deals with some Taliban elements, it's probably not wise to give them reason to suspect any outreach might be a trap.
Relatedly, Carl Levin had this complaint in today's NYT:
OK, the Bertrand Russell psychodrama is also malicious but maybe not dangerously so. About six months ago, I came across a web posting announcing the formation of a Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Yes, it was one of those false kangaroo courts in which, from the Stalin era on, convenes not to evaluate evidence but to condemn. In loads of cases the verdicts brought quick impositions of the death sentence. One such process is now unfolding in Tehran, and its backers are Muslim millenarians and western leftists who are prone to support every revolution even if it is decidedly and objectively reactionary, nay, fascistic. This hangmen's jurisprudence will soon end its proceedings and it will end in blood. The Russell production will be a show trial.
The convener of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, Ken Coates, is the chairman of the Betrand Russell Peace Foundation who has been in this unproductive line of work at least as early as 1975 when he and Noam Chomsky wrote their sympathizers (through the New York Review of Books, of course) to ask for help in raising 20,000 pounds, not a big sum for an organization with so many flashy supporters. Now, fast forward to 2009, and the occupiers of the Russell name are still out on the street pandering for support. Dorothy Day's sweet old Catholic Worker does better.
It sounds like the insurers aren't too keen on the insurance company tax Max Baucus is now flirting with for his Finance Committee compromise:
Insurers and many Republicans in Congress oppose the fees, saying they would be passed on to families and employers who buy insurance. Robert E. Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, said the fees would “make coverage less affordable.”
Last week, when the Chamber of Commerce announced it would petition the EPA to hold a "Scopes Monkey Trial" on the science behind global warming, we wondered whether some of the Chamber’s more climate-friendly members might protest.
On August 4, Haaretz reported that Benjamin Netanyahu called Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod self-hating Jews. A spokesman for the prime minister later denied this, but I have heard from Israeli friends that this conspiratorial explanation is quite popular in the prime minister’s office. I have no reason to believe otherwise. The accusation of ethnic infidelity is an old feature of the political culture of the Likud. The defenders of Greater Israel have values, but the critics of Greater Israel have motives. Perhaps the nether regions of the Israeli right will soon follow the nether regions of the American right, and alongside the birthers we will have the brissers: I mean, any man who opposes Jewish settlement in the West Bank must have a foreskin. It is important to understand that for the paranoid mentality that regards disagreement as betrayal, all of Emanuel’s Israeliness--his name, his Irgun father, his Hebrew, his service in an Israeli army program for civilians during the Gulf War--makes him more, not less, untrustworthy. There is a long and dark history, after all, of apostates and informers who came from within the community.
In the latest attempt to prove that, while they might be at a nasty impasse on issues like health care, liberals and conservatives can find common ground on education policy, odd couple Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton will be hitting the road this fall, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to promote school reform.
Last week, the White House released a list of recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States government can afford a civilian. Among the 16 awardees are truly great figures: breast cancer philanthropist Nancy Goodman Brinker, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.
At today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Sudan, questions came up about an open disagreement between General Scott Gration, Obama's Darfur envoy, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, over whether Sudan is currently committing genocide.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Could there be a worse spokesman for gay rights than Sean Penn? During his acceptance speech last night, he sarcastically described Academy voters as "commie, homo-loving sons of guns." I know Penn was trying to make a joke about his own far-left politics. Still, unlike Sean Penn, most people who support gay rights do not also support communists. And communists do not generally have a good record on gay rights.
