"raghead"

This article from the Charleston, SC NBC affiliate is amazing in so many ways, for the offensiveness of the story itself, the inaccuracy of the guy's comments, for the choice of title, for the apology. South Carolina is a crazy place.

No, wait, this may be better. The money quote:

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

Obama's health insurance reform speech

The text here. Remembering the emotion of last year's squabbles between Democratic primary candidates on health care reform, it is notable that the current plan appears to be candidate Obama's insurance exchange plus Obama's subsidies for the poor plus Clinton's insurance mandates, with Edwards' method of enforcement. This is all, of course, leaving aside candidate Kucinich's health plan, Medicare for all, which is still the best plan, but that doesn't really matter at this point.

Judging from the president's words last night, it's pretty clear that the public option he envisions is an anemic thing, capable of providing care but not of providing it well enough to compete for customers who can afford to go elsewhere. That is a shame, and the Reaganites who believe government only works when it redistributes wealth upward will make some serious political hay out of it down the road. I know that sounds like politics rather than policy discussion, but it is in policy where we will pay dearly for this compromise.

Also, we heard it officially tonight: the president's plan will mandate that people purchase private health insurance, and use subsidies to help the poor afford it -- in other words, tax revenue funneled directly into the pockets of Wall Street health insurance investors. Free money for the bad actors who caused much of this mess in the first place. I still don't get this compromise. If you want to achieve universal coverage, why not just create a public option and sign everyone up for it? Then set it up so that the fees and services for the public option begin next year, and add a form to this year's taxes whereby people find out how much they owe for the public option, or can check a box to decline the option if they provide their alternative policy. No policy, no checking the box. No need for fines or other enforcement mechanisms than the IRS' current policies and staff. Universal coverage. Easy peasy.

How is forcing people to pay private insurance premiums preferable from either a political or policy standpoint?

On the other hand, there is this:

Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies - because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.

It doesn't deal with the issues of millions of uninsured people, obscenely high malpractice insurance premiums, or of various other problems in the health care industry, and will only be as good as the organization charged with enforcing it, but this paragraph alone probably makes the bill worth signing. If the Democrats can't get a workable universal coverage/universal access bill out of the Senate, it would be worth their time to create a separate bill with these provisions alone to put an end to the most barbaric abuses in the system. I'm tempted to say I would prefer that even to universal coverage provided in the rest of the plan.

if I were Obama's strategist

I'd think about sending the president off to do a speech in Los Angeles right about now, say at the Forum in Inglewood, rather than a town hall in Montana.

Just a thought.

I've been outed!

Now I'll never be president!

we hardly know ya

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Mary Ann Glendon shivs the President

If you haven't heard yet, you probably will: this year's Laetare Medal recipient, Mary Ann Glendon, is boycotting Notre Dame's commencement because the Dark Lord, Barack Obama, will be there. Glendon served as Ambassador to the Vatican from '07 to '09, and it's not like this is the first time we've seen Bush Administration officials turn around and attack the new president after serving in that trainwreck. Nevertheless, it's particularly rich coming from this Great Moral Arbiter who, so far as I can tell, was hunky dory with her old boss' frequent, gleeful, and unrepentant use of the death penalty, not to mention sanctioning of torture, mendacity, and killing of hundreds of thousands of people in an unjust war. Barack Obama being pro-Roe, however, totally crosses the line.

I know it may seem like I'm spending a lot of time on this subject, but what can I say? This really sticks in my craw. Ths kind of double-standard makes practicing Catholics (and Christians generally) look a little, well, "weird" to everyone else, especially the inflation of gay marriage and birth control and stem cells and, yes, abortion to the status of absolute moral sine qua nons, when these same people have no comment or waffle or find some sort of "nuance" on torture, preemptive war, child molestation, worldwide poverty, etc. Where was Glendon when George W. Bush was accepting the very same degree from Notre Dame in 2001, with the blood of dozens of prisoners fresh on his hands? Where was Bishop D'Arcy when Catholics were clamoring for someone in the clergy, anyone at all, willing to say that any priest caught molesting children should be cast from the Church and left to the mercy of the American legal system?

From what I can tell, she's also very fond of calling herself a feminist while lecturing other women on what they should be doing with their bodies, so I'm not exactly crushed that she won't be gracing the stage this year.

yet she gets paid to write it

It's become like clockwork. Once every couple of weeks, I glance at the Salon article titles and see one that makes me think: "What the hell? What planet is that wanker living on?" It always turns out to be Camille Paglia's biweekly column.

This week she slaps down Obama for totally botching his first major trip abroad and the G-20. He sure embarrassed the hell out of all of us on that gaffe train, am I right?

yeah, educated-sounding presidents are THE WORST!

Why does Obama stay short on details so often? Among other reasons, it could be because this is the reaction he gets from the supposedly-details-hungry press when he offers them some substance:

For just under an hour on Tuesday night, Americans saw not the fiery and inspirational speaker who riveted the nation in his address to Congress last month, or the conversational president who warmly engaged Americans in talks across the country, or even the jaunty and jokey president who turned up on Jay Leno.

Instead, in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign. Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, “as I said before” — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.

Yeah, what the hell, Obama? No one wants to sit and listen to whole paragraphs about the collapse of the economy. What's with all this smarty talk, with numbers even?! This is TV, for God's sake; you're cutting into NCIS! Can't you just bow your legs, squint, and say, "we're gunna git'em varmints!" like the last guy? He was entertaining, and so strong and folksy!

Do us all a favor: next time we tell you we want details, just substitute an Old West-sounding catchphrase. Those are so cool!

That quoted paragraph, by the way, isn't from FOX News, or Yahoo! Entertainment News, or Maureen Dowd's catty, superficial editorial column. It's from the New York Times. At the top of the homepage. The first two paragraphs.

What I think is most interesting about this reaction is what it says about these reporters' opinion of the American people. Apparently the vast majority of us who bother to watch pressers are either insufficiently affected by the economy to care about this stuff as anything more than entertainment, or too stupid to pay attention through "long paragraphs." Apparently all journalism, no matter how serious the subject matter, is just entertainment now.

intractable, or perhaps perfidious

And thus for the second time in two weeks Barack Obama makes a major and unnecessarily generous overture to Republicans, then they agree to go along, but with a set of harsh conditions, and when he agrees to the conditions, they go back on the deal at the 11th hour anyway.

They aren't interested in governing alongside another party. It's harder, more risky, and requires more icky compromising than standing just outside hurling bricks. Eventually we (and the president, for that matter) are going to have to recognize that Obama actually did win all the moderate Republican votes on the first stimulus go-round.

A hill staffer writing to TPM points out more evidence of Republican bad faith in the Gregg withdrawal:

It's hard not to think that Gregg's withdrawal, with the grumbling about the census and the stimulus, was not timed [sic] to cause the most damage possible to the Obama administration. Releasing the statement just as Obama took the stage in Peoria was clearly designed to undermine the President's event. The fact he scheduled a presser only seems to confirm it. The classy exit would have been to wait til tomorrow afternoon to quietly bow out. Basically Gregg decided not just to politely decline, but rather to blow shit up and burn the bridge behind him. Do not think this portends good things for the wider political climate.

If the larger GOP strategy can be describe as putting all of their chips on "FAIL", this has to be seen as a significant addition to that pile, no?

If the press were to talk about "seriousness" in a way that was sensible and evidence-based, it would point out that the Republicans are apparently not serious about taking part in the running of the government. They're like maladjusted teenagers playing a shoot-em-up game, feigning cooperation with other players just long enough to get them to drop their defenses.

the 60th Senate Democrat?

Hysterical. Clever, clever Obama. Judd Gregg is a Republican Senator from New Hampshire. The person who would appoint his successor is John Lynch, the Democratic governor.

This is where we see just how "bareknuckle" Obama is. If he wanted, he could use this opportunity to create a Democratic supermajority in the senate and ram through his entire agenda, Parliament-style, Republicans be damned. Or, he could hold out this possibility to Mitch McConnell to extort something big out of the GOP, say a big climate change package or a well-functioning government health insurance program.

My suspicion is that Obama will do neither of these and pass up a golden opportunity for the sake of comity with Senate Republicans, as much as I hate to say it. He may even publicly disavow such a hardball move as a gesture of good faith. I think Obama's a true believer when he talks about bipartisanship. Let's hope his faith in the better angels of the GOP is justified.

The main argument I've heard against the possibility of this happening is the question of Gregg's motivation to go along with something that forever tarnish his name in his own political party. Well, here's his incentive: Gregg's up for re-election in 2010 and under 50% against Democrat Paul Hodes in rapidly bluing New Hampshire. Interesting fact about the 50% mark: those senators who polled above 50% during the year of their re-election in every poll all won their re-elections. Among the incumbents who had even one poll in that entire year show them under the magic 50% mark, fully half lost their elections. And let's not forget that he'll be running in New Hampshire, which booted the other Republican senator from office in November, both of its Republican congressmen, 7 of state senators (out of a total senate of 24), and 102 state representatives (out of a total assembly of 400) in 2006, and just re-elected its Democratic governor with 74% of the vote.

According to the odds, there's a 50/50 chance that Judd Gregg will not be senator in 2011 no matter what he does. Looks like plenty of incentive to me. I imagine that, if this coup doesn't happen, it will have been aborted by the president, not the senior senator from New Hampshire.

President Obama signs his first bill-- and it's a big one

The Lily Ledbetter Act is now law. I would like to point out exactly what the law does. From the text:

To amend title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and to modify the operation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, to clarify that a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice that is unlawful under such Acts occurs each time compensation is paid pursuant to the discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex, and for other purposes.

The point of this change is to get around the bizarre reinterpretation of existing congressional law from the Supreme Court, in which the act of breaking of law via paying unequal wages only occurs the first time the pay is made unequal and that the statute of limitations for pressing charges is 180 days after that. Now the statute of limitations is effectively 180 days after the last time pay is meted out unequally.

There's also the change in how the violations accumulate as well, though. Now each occurrence of paying unequally is a separate violation of the law, implying that beforehand any continuous period of unequal was only one violation. Theoretically, then, does this mean that a company who pays its workers on a biweekly basis could now be guilty of as many as 12 violations of the law for paying a woman less for 6 months (one count for every paycheck)? If so, awesome.

Obama talks to Al-Arabiya

I would like to note, for the record, that this was a masterful stroke from the new president. If you're going to slip the dagger to an electorally weakened but still belligerent Ahmadinejad, while calming people down and getting the Middle East thinking about peace again, this is how you do it. And there's just nobody out there can do this kind of thing better than Barack Obama.

If nothing else, the fact that Bush dead-enders are livid with Obama for it probably means it was the right thing to do.

Mr. Obama, please don't "swing for the fences"

I've been thinking a lot lately about the TV show Sports Night and how Sorkin makes sports relevant and meaningful by juxtaposing it with "real life" and showing just how similar the two often are and how sports can, in fact, offer some insight into human behavior and even the occasional "nugget of wisdom," and not just in the way of trite, saccharin life lessons and cliches about sportsmanship and the human spirit.

For instance, in one episode the show they work on is focused on an Olympic long jumper, Oscar Parrish, who's come close to breaking the world record several times, but each time before he got sidetracked somehow: his father's death, an injury during practice, etc. Finally, at 33, he makes it back to the competition at what is obviously his last chance, he's primed and ready, he jumps, and he's done it. A new world record.

And the 18 year old jumping after him lands a foot further.

The lesson for three characters, Dana, Jeremy, and Dan (in very different situations), is that you can try your hardest, and you can even accomplish the things you have control over, but you can't guarantee how long the fruits of your labor will last because of circumstances outside your control. The time you spend at the top of your personal mountain can be short indeed, so enjoy it while it lasts.

I wish Keith Olbermann would talk more about sports and less about politics, not just because I think he's a better sportscaster than political pundit, but because sports and politics share something in common that I find truly fascinating: often people in the media will use a sports analogy for politics, and in the process they typically use a misreading of sports to give a misreading of politics.

A couple of years ago, for example, there was the example of "doubling down." It was used to describe a tactical move where the president seemed to "double" the amount of effort he was investing in something (I think funding for the surge). The problem is that "doubling down" is what a poker blackjack player* does from a position of strength, whereas the president was actually working from position of desperation, giving the same idea a second go in the hope of winning. That is not "doubling down," but rather "going double or nothing" which describes a very different situation.

With this sports/politics mangling in mind, I read David Brooks' column about Ryne Sandberg's 2005 induction into the Hall of Fame this morning. From that column, a quote from Sandberg's speech:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

Sandberg's point obviously is as more about respecting the game as it was meant to be played, but there's a lot of practical advice in that as well. From what I gather, swinging for the fences is generally a bad thing in baseball except under optimal circumstances. If you send your players out swinging for the fences, what you're most likely to end up with is 3 outs and a very short time at bat. Similarly, when a defense has a really bad inning and allows a ton of runs, it's usually not because they suffered a string of home runs, but rather a long string of base hits. Players who always swing for the fences do so out of misplaced priorities, out of preferencing their stats and sponsorships and spot in the recaps over the success of their team. Sure, they're more likely to get home runs, but they're also more likely to pop out or strike out and, thus, to contribute to their team losing. Politics, like baseball, is a game where incremental gains can quickly lead to an avalanche, and where gaudy, selfish plays are not only unlikely to succeed but can backfire spectacularly.

George W. Bush got a massive influx of political capital after 9/11, and decided to just swing for the fences (make the Middle East democratic). He failed, and it sidelined his domestic agenda for the rest of his first term and sidled him with the bane of 20th century presidents: an unpopular war. He won re-election and swung for the fences again with privatizing Social Security. He failed again, and it doomed his agenda for the remainder of his administration. His failures also contributed substantially to his party losing everything they had won over the last 20 years.

So President Obama, go for the smart play. Don't just go out there swinging for the fences. Get a few base hits, get a couple of fast runners on base. As you've said yourself over and over, this is not about you. It's about your team and your sport and everyone who's affected by it. You've got a lot of things to fix, both big and small, and the political capital you've built up has to last. There will be opportunities to swing for the fences, and some will be early, but smart playing also involves a lot of base hits, stolen bases, smart defense, and a bunt here and there.

*: See Rene's comment for explanation of the fix. The benefit of blogs is that there's always people out there checking your work who know more than you do about the subject.

NYT on Obama's options in Palestine

I thought this article was pretty helpful in setting the game board. It's interesting, and unfortunate, that Hamas seems to have come out of the Gaza invasion more popular than before, at least in the West Bank. It's especially interesting and unfortunate that such an advance for Hamas is coupled with the likely victory of Benyamin Netanyahu and the bloody-minded Likud party next month. In fact, polls show both Likud and the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party making huge gains.

The cause of peace has apparently been outflanked after eight years of Republican negligence. I have a bad feeling that Gaza was just the prelude, and I doubt anyone can stop what's coming now.

President Obama freezes salaries and institutes new ethics rules

Apparently he was serious about lobbying reform.

a video to rev you up for the moment

November 4, 2008: the recap.

President Barack Obama: the official photo

This photo is the one you'll see when at embassies, and in the airport security office when you forget your passport. I find it a little jarring, personally. It's weird that he's off center and not smiling, and that there's so much space at the top over his head.

"it opens more doors than it closes"

E.J. Dionne on the Warren invite. Dionne's point is that engaging a powerful pastor who wants to talk about poverty, disease, climate change, and genocide is a win for Democrats and a win for the world and a loss for Republicans. It would be nice if he didn't support prop 8 and believe horrible things about gays, or would at least apologize for his more incendiary comments, but as we've seen with Rich Cizik, support for gay rights is still verboten in the evangelical community. The terrible irony is that, if he did apologize or did support civil unions, he would cease to hold enough support in the evangelical community to be able to sway it in any meaningful way.

What can I say? You go to the inauguration with the country you have, not the country you wish you had.

Warren-mania: throwing God's pit bulls a bone

This morning I heard someone on NPR refer to those angry with Obama for choosing Warren to lead a prayer on Inauguration Day as "activists." What, exactly, makes them "activist?" The act of being disappointed? Why are they "activists," but those who fought to pass Prop 8 are merely "social conservatives" or even worse, "family advocates?"

While we're at it, it's not like liberals and liberal-leaners don't have a legitimate beef with Obama's choice; after all, he now has more Republicans in his administration than avowed liberals, and does so even if you concede that Hillary Clinton is a liberal. You can't swing a cat in Obama's cabinet without hitting a blue dog or three.

Nevertheless, it's worth considering that apparently there will be 2 preachers at Obama's inauguration, and the one giving the closing benediction is GLBT friendly. That, I would imagine, is a first, while every previous preacher probably had views similar to Warren. Furthermore, for all Warren's faults, he's willing to lead the evangelical community back to sanity on aid to the poor, HIV/AIDS work, and climate change. Obama and the Democrats have an interest in seeing Warren's influence over the evangelical community further increase for those reasons. Obama wants to send a message to the evangelical community that they matter in an Obama Administration, that they don't have to go Republican to have leaders who listen to them, and gay-friendly evangelical pastors just don't have much credibility within that community.

Plus, let's face it, this isn't exactly a cabinet position.

UPDATE: And as I write that Obama has appointed hardly any progressives, he names Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor, who's almost as solidly pro-labor as you can get.

Captain Obvious brings you TIME's Person of the Year

It's true that they shouldn't get into the habit of making every new president the Person of the Year, but really, this one is pretty clearly the right call. Barack has dominated the news the entire year, he's felled two of America's political titans, taken over the Democratic party, and been forced to become de facto president 2 months early. His election victory made millions of people proud to be Americans again and humbled formerly snickering European nations who have been forced to admit that, for all their liberal politics, they're not yet egalitarian enough to elect an ethnic minority head of the government. That victory also led the Iraqi government to finalize a power-sharing agreement with the United States, now confident that the next president will fulfill Bush's promise to leave Iraq.

These are really cool.

TIME also gives an uninspired list of runners up and "people who mattered," including people like John McCain and Sarah Palin who were proven notably inconsequential in front of the Obama steamroller. In fact, I would have added Katie Couric to the list of special people for single-handedly laying the death knell to Sarah Palin's fledgling career in national politics. Nevertheless, Palin landed a runner-up slot rather than Hillary Clinton, who was the first legitimate female presidential contender, a far tougher, more resilient opponent than McCain/Palin, and who exits 2008 with a much louder bull-horn than Palin as Secretary of State. More of that vaunted media "balance," I'm guessing. Both McCain and Palin place higher, incidentally, than Robert Mugabe, who has certainly influenced more lives worldwide more profoundly, not to mention international politics. One name is conspicuously missing from the list entirely, and it's the only name I can think of that could possibly have "mattered" this year anywhere near as much as Barack Obama: Vladimir Putin.

Yet TIME saw fit to add Robert Downey, Jr. to the list instead.

It looks like TIME's only real metric for deciding these lists is who gets the most mentions in the news, but that's a terrible way to decide who makes the most significant impact. In the case of Obama, that works because the United States has been obsessed with him all year long, but that system also preferences celebrity over substance. Hence you get Michael Phelps on your list because Phelps won 8 swimming medals, and not Hu Jintao, who is the president of the biggest nation on the planet and the one that hosted said Olympics. You get the CEO of Lehman Bros. because his firm made a big splash when it splattered against the pavement, but you don't get Alan Greenspan or Phil Gramm, who may be the two figures most intimately responsible for the economic collapse that's now affected the entire world. You get Mikheil Saakashvili because his name showed up in the news a lot for "poking the Russian bear," but the big winner in that conflict, the one who looked a lot bigger afterwards and affected the state of international politics, was the bear. And, of course, you get people like Downey and Phelps and Tina Fey, people we liked to watch but who weren't meaningful to our lives. Does making 2 successful movies that revive your moribund acting career mean you "mattered" this year in the same sense that Hillary Clinton or Henry Paulson "mattered?"