Rational and humane people (including athletes) are killing Rush Limbaugh’s plan to buy a football team — as well they should. What’s more — other countries are impressed by our humanity! This is good news; is there a non-racist in the world who does not think Limbaugh is racist?

Calling the suitor of the St. Louis Rams a “jerk,” Jets LB Bart Scott said he would never play for the team if Rush Limbaugh is successful in his bid to buy the NFL franchise.

Scott and Giants DE Mathias Kiwanuka, in comments to the New York Daily News, said Limbaugh’s racial insensitivity and his controversial comments about black people are gamebreakers that would keep them away from the Rams.

Their criticisms add to a long list of people who say they don’t want Limbaugh in the NFL.

As I noted below, Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is beyond ridiculous.

Opinions on this vary. Unsurprisingly, Obama cultists and tv personalities on the center/barely left, are gushing with praise. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald,  a sensible voice or principal in the world of political discourse dominated by right-wing morons and Obama-worshiping liberals, notes that Chris Matthews and the like are insisting that “Presidents are entitled to certain Special Days where citizens are obligated to cheer for the leader and refrain from expressing criticisms.”

Greenwald adds:

Similarly, it’s excessively negative and disrespectful to point out the glaring inconsistency between (a) escalating a war, killing civilians with air raids and imprisoning people with no charges and (b) receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.  And anyone who disagrees that Obama deserves the Prize is a Far Leftist purist on the same side as the Terrorists and other America-haters and enemies.  Today is one of those days when 2003 doesn’t seem to be too far in the past.

Foreign leaders have mixed views; while Syria embraced the award, Hamas and the Taliban condemned it. As have Republicans, who are not upset by Obama’s war crimes so much as his lack of accomplishments. Still, given that the award was given out in February — just weeks after the committee selected the winner — a reasonable person must admit that Michael Steele, the bumbling RNC chairman, was right when he asked, “What has Obama actually accomplished?” and lamented that his “star power” stole the award away from more deserving advocates for peace.

It is not often that Hamas, Glenn Greenwald and Michael Steele agree — but, what can I say, they are all right: this is a bad joke.

Some liberals, including Peter Beinart, of CFR, and Richard Kim, of the Nation, are skeptical of the award, but still miss the big point.

Consider what Kim wrote in the Nation.

It’s as if the Nobel Committee gave Obama the award for behaving like a normal American president, instead of like a clueless corrupt cowboy.

Kim is right to question the validity of the award, but his analysis is backward. Yes, Obama is acting like a “normal president” — as in he, like virtually all US presidents in the post World War 2 era, has continued the violent policies of perpetual warfare. In fact, short of only Bush 2 perhaps, Obama is among the most guilty of having a violent  and corrupt foreign policy given that he has adopted virtually all of the major tenets of his predecessor’s war policies, other than his willingness to talk to enemies. But if that is all it takes to win a peace prize than you might as well give one to Kissinger! (oh, wait, nevermind).

Take, for example, this very thorough article in the New Republic, by former Bush advisor Jack Goldsmith, that notes that, “The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit.”

Obama, he notes, has embraced 10 of 11 of the major aspects of the Bush presidency including on Habeas Corpus,  targeted assassinations, rendition, secret prisons, surveillance , state secrets and interrogation.

President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.

The fact that Obama is acting like a “normal president” of the most violent country in the world is exactly why he should not be given this award.

The problem is not merely that he has not accomplished a lot, as Beinart suggests, but that he has initiated destructive, violent and inhumane policies that have led to the deaths of innocent civilians. If that doesn’t bar someone from winning a Nobel Peace Prize, than what does?

When I awoke this morning to learn his Hopiness, President Barack Obama, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I sat in stunned disbelief.

This is the same man who has maintained two brutal and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, advocates a permanent state of warfare, locking up people in cages without trial indefinitely, refusing to fight for a guaranteed, national healthcare plan, while at the same time spending ever more money on weapons, supports egregious assaults on our civil liberties, opposes marriage equality for gays, has overseen massive civilian causalities with the use of drones (used for assassination attempts), supports all the major tenets of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, said nothing while innocent Palestineans were bombed by Israel’s massive collective punishment of Gaza in January, and lied to the electorate about executive branch transparency.

 Even the criteria that is reportedly the reasons for his victory – his policies on diplomacy, nuclear weapons and climate change – are patently ridiculous. Obama has not even passed a climate change bill, and seems well poised to cave on the issue. He has also, as mideast scholar Steve Maher, explained to me, “explicitly agreed to allow israel to keep its nuclear weapons secretly.”

Obama, a man of peace? As Maher said, “tell that to dead kids in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Pakistan, Honduras, Peru, Somalia, Colombia, and on and on…”

This award is a complete disgrace to human rights, critical thought and makes a complete and utter mockery of the award. But what can we expect from an organization that has awarded this prize to war criminals like Henry Kissinger?

 

I saw Michael Moore’s film this weekend and will have a review up later this week, when time permits.

For now, however, I can link you to a piece I wrote for Campus Progress, a magazine that covers college politics and activism, run by the center-left thinkthank, the Center of American Progress.

The piece is about  the impact of Michael Moore on campuses around the country, including Boston (as an alumni of Emerson College I interviewed three sources from there).

Few things in today’s political world generate as much enthusiasm, hysteria, and debate as the release of a Michael Moore documentary. And just days before the release of his latest polemic, Capitalism: A Love Story, a film which takes on the entire U.S. economic system, the fervor over one of today’s most controversial figures—his style, his politics, his personality—has reached critical mass.

Moore’s popularity and notoriety are far-reaching; he has been seen on virtually every prominent news show in the last couple of weeks to explain his movie and was recently described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most successful documentary filmmaker in history.” It’s not surprising then that across college campuses, where the exchange of political ideas is an everyday occurrence, Moore’s films are widely watched, distributed, and debated in classrooms and among student activists.

“The thing about Moore is that he always seems to hit the ‘hot button’ so to speak, and gets students to really think and consider issues,” says Dr. J. Gregory Payne, a political communications professor at Emerson College and former State Department consultant, who has used Michael Moore films in classes about political rhetoric.

The more interesting part of crafting this piece, which ran on Friday to coincide with the release of the film, was interviewing David Horowitz, a staunch anti-leftist, who argues that left-wing professors are ruining America.

Among those who do not like Michael Moore is David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which aims to expose what Horowitz believes is left wing domination of academia. Horowitz, a former lefty who turned conservative in the mid-1970s, says in an interview with Campus Progress that Moore is a true “Leninist … with the stupidest Marxist view of things.”

[...]

I think it is lazy. Teachers are already under-worked and overpaid. I think they should get a pay cut each time they show a movie,” he said.

I will be writing a review of the film here, and then plan to do what is even more fun: reviewing the reviews.  Moore and I are mostly on the same page, but I find his analysis — at times — to be incoherent and simple-minded. Fahrenheit 9-11, was a truly awful film, that was short-sighted on the history of US foreign policy. Sicko, however, was a gem  – a persuasive, yet funny look at the despicable nature of the US healthcare system, juxtaposed brilliantly with the far more humane systems that other countries have.

——————————————————————————-

July 3, 2007

UPDATE: Despite the obvious mistakes in this piece, it managed to be quoted at length, approvingly, in the business section of the New York Times. This is simply unreal.

MTV’s Kurt Loder reviews Sicko, and shows an ignorance so remarkable, I am left nearly speechless.

 

Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. 

How does he know? Well, Mr Loder, if you bothered to take advantage of this wonderful invention called Google, you will learn that — gasp! — they actually calculate these figures. They have studies and everything! It is quite fascinating. Yes, of course, we don’t know that 18,000 people will die this year. It may, in fact, be more. But we do know, thanks to the wonderful invention of statistics, how many people die, on average each year from lack of health insurance: 18,000.

What’s worse, this is a commonly used statistic that as far as I can tell, is entirely undisputed.

Jesus …

UPDATE: All right, I managed to make it down to the rest of this review and again, I can not allow such nonsense to go unchallenged.

At least when Cato or something, critique the logic behind a national health plan (or this movie) they hire people who understand policy. They obviously have different values than I do, and I would disagree with their conclusions, but they are capable of research.

The problem with many of these piss-poor Sicko reviews (this weeks review in the Weekly Dig was one of the worst articles, review or otherwise, that I have ever read in a publication that wasn’t funded by a Student Government Association) is that the film critics are just that: film critics. They are not policy experts. But when they try to review a movie that is inseparable from policy, they just end up wasting valuable space.

Onward to Loder’s nonsense.

The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

Loder has stooped to outright red-baiting. “One,” clearly means — oh no … don’t say it … it can’t be — Socialism! (The next sentence begins “A proud socialist, Moore …” ) This is all the more fitting since Moore pointed out in great detail how the tactic of claiming that health care reform is the obvious first step to outright Communism, has been employed often and in laughably absurd ways for years.

First of all, Moore actually does not offer only one solution. France, Canada, the UK, and Cuba have health policies that are totally different from one another. The obvious similarity, and the point Moore drove home quite well, is that they are publicly funded and universal. But this is not radical. This is true of all developed countries, sans the US. It hasn’t turned the rest of the world into commies, not even close. They just treat health care as something so important, as to warrant making sure everyone has it, much the same as the US approaches firefighters, or public schools, or whatever else.

Loder, however, manages to contradict himself without hesitation.

n 1993, when one of Moore’s heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word “sexy!” in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton’s plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected.

Where to begin. First of all, Loder makes the claim that Moore supported the Clinton plan. He doesn’t (Again, Kurt, try the Internet, it is really quite valuable). In fact, the Clinton plan, far from being Socialist, actually would have preserved the private health industry, which counteracts with Moore’s stated goal, which he has said in every interview he has done: get rid of the private health insurance industry.

The point, was not to show support for the plan, but to show the type of reactionary opposition that was thrown at it from the right — so reactionary and vile, so hyperbolic and absurd. Even proposing band-aid solutions, as Clinton did, is enough to get the politicians (with financial incentive from the drug and insurance companies) into a frenzy.

(Which is why, as an aside, the likes of Edwards and Obama should just back HR676 (Medicare for All) rather than have these Clinton-esque hybrid plans. Both will meet intense opposition, but the Medicare for All bill would actually be worth fighting over, and has massive grassroots appeal. When was the last time you saw a rally in the streets with people screaming for an individual mandate?)

Moreover, the Clinton bill was killed, not by the people, who never had a say in the matter, but in DC by the GOP. This was due in large part to a memo (there is no health care crises) by then political operative (now editor of the Weekly Standard) William Kristol, that ordered the GOP kill any Clinton health plan, no matter what it was, so as to not give the Clinton’s a political victory.

And in fact, people have no real influence on the health care debate. If they did, than a single-payer system would not be considered politically impossible. As I have noted before, the majority of Americans support a single-payer system to our current system. It is only considered “politically impossible” because in the US corporate dollars have way more influence in matters of public policy than people do.

And even if Moore did support the Hillary Plan, than Loder would have to concede, contrary to his previous meanderings, that Moore has more than one solution he likes. It seems quite clear that Loder does not know the difference between what Clinton proposed and what they have in France or Canada. In short, he seems to know nothing at all about the issue he is writing about.

One last passage:

 

Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity? 

So a guy gets cancer and then has the audacity to take three months off to grow his hair back, and get well. This is a bad thing? And why is this economic insanity? Sure, generous social services can slow growth a bit, but so what? 18,000 people die a year from lack of health insurance in the US. I would gladly sacrifice a little bit of economic growth to save 18,000 lives. How do you measure wealth? Is going through life without having to worry about losing your income due to illness not valuable?

This review is just insulting. Even those who oppose the type of health reform that the entire world has and that Moore advocates, cannot possibly trust this review since the author literally offers no valid argument, and clearly does not know what he is talking about. Why would Andrew Sullivan (whose blog linked me to this review, or I would not have found it) approvingly link to such a wasted argument?

Amazingly, however, this is not the worst review. So tomorrow sometime soon, in part two of this series, I will address the aforementioned Weekly Dig article.

Hello and welcome to Critical Leverage.

Critical Leverage has been online since February 2007. I started it as a Nation intern to have a place to ruminate about politics and to compile my work in one place. Now, after several years on blogger, John Guilfoil, editor of the start-up web magazine Blast, has agreed to host it.

The arrangement is mutually beneficial, as I provide John content — stuff I would have written on blogger anyway — and he provides me with his built-in audience. The blog has gone through several phases, including a 20-month period with minimal posting due to a full-time newspaper job that made regular posting impossible. But generally speaking it takes a look at the following issues: the media, and US policy — especially foreign policy and healthcare.

The above topics gives me wide latitude to write about most anything. But if you examine my background at the old home for Critical Leverage(and now a place where I store clips), you will see the areas I tend to write about most often.  Media and foreign policy is my area of most expertise. In fact, the term critical leverage is a foreign policy reference. But I have long been a passionate health policy wonk, and a supporter of a humane, national healthcare system. This will always be a major focus on my work.

To give you some background, I am a graduate of Emerson College print and multimedia journalism program. While there, I, like so many other Emersonians, landed a internship/co-op at the Boston Globe. I spent six months at the Boston Globe editorial page — which provided me with the chance to write and blog without any pretext of objectivity — and further cemented by love of persuasive political writing. I then spent sometime at the Globe news room, which is where I met Blast’s charismatic editor( who is, once again, a colleague of mine at the very same newsroom).

Soon thereafter I went to the Nation magazine, American’s oldest news weekly,  as an intern. This was a transformative experience, thanks in large part to the guidance of my boss, Katrina vanden Heuvel.  This was followed by two years in the great state of Vermont, covering state and local governments.

Now I am back in Boston and am writing for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Extra!, Campus Progress and earning a master’s degree in international relations. To learn more about me, click here.

The major goal of my writing is to provide reasonable analysis, and try to widen the parameters of debate. The blog is non-partisan; while I am a lefty — and unapologetic about it — I spend more time attacking Obama than the Republicans, as a look below at previous posts will attest.

I am not going to promise how often I will post, as there are too many variables — namely, the amount of freelance work I am contracted for and the amount of research I am engaged in my master’s program. This shit has to come first, for obvious reasons (it is how I earn my living) and blogging is a supplement to those areas, not my primary responsibility. Ideally, posts will be frequent, but I imagine there will be some ebb and flow. Please bear with me.

I welcome comment and vigorous argument. If you are ambitious and well-reasoned enough, I would even be happy to invite opposition to serve as a guest blogger for the purposes of debate.

Anyway, enough about me. There is a big world out there, and a fuckload of awful injustices that are worthy of bitching about. Thanks so much for reading,

Just a week removed from Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech about healthcare reform, one can hardly deny the shrewdness of our new president’s rhetorical skills. This is not a good thing.

Obama, in attempting the first significant healthcare reform legislation in 40 years, understood quite well what he needed to do:get the base – the people who donated money, sweat and tears to get him elected — off his back, and on his side, without ceding them anything on the policy front. And a week later it appears he has pulled off this major feat, while hiding behind strong but largely empty language about the nature of liberalism.

Obama’s speech laid out a plan that primarily did three things.

1) It threw a huge bone to private insurance companies by providing a mandate, forcing uninsured people to buy policies, thus guaranteeing tens of millions of new customers to buy thier products or face tax penalties. Insurance companies love this idea, and having donated large piles of money to both political parties, this position has the support of both sides of the isle in Washington. Small wonder Business Week recently declared that the “Health Insurers have Already Won.”

2) His plan drew a line on the sand on the deficit, in an effort to appeal to budget hawks. Obama declared he will not sign a bill that adds even “one dime” to the deficit, showing no flexibility on the matter.

3) The President, for all practical purposes, killed prospects for a public option, by saying it was only a “means” to an end, and unessential. There will be no veto threats or legislative arm-twisting on this issue. Instead the left gets lectured for using the public option as a “handy excuse” to have the “usual Washington ideological battles” (as if standing up for something the public wants and voted for is some kind of egregious sin).

The third point is critical. Going into the speech, many liberals, most notably among House Democrats, were demanding a public option. Some of them, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were insisting that the legislation include a public healthcare plan that uninsured Americans could buy into (most constructs of the plan would not allow someone currently enrolled in an employer-based plan to buy in — already a huge concession from the left), lest they vote against the bill.

Obama could have used his speech to fight for such a reform, if he so chose. A whopping 72 percent of the public support a public option of some sort, while 59 percent support a sweeping national healthcare plan (ie, Medicare for All, or single-payer healthcare.) Further, due to progressive domination of the last two elections, Obama is blessed with mammoth majorities in both chambers of Congress. While it is true the GOP will not support a public option, it is a moot point — the GOP, save perhaps one lone Senator, won’t support a bill without a public option either. And the Democrats have the ability to pass through a bill with only 51 votes, as Republicans did with the Bush tax cuts in 2001.

But while Obama drew a line in the sand on the deficit, refusing to budge with one dime, he wavered on the public option — saying that while he likes the idea, he is not married to it. The end result: the insurance companies get what they want — no public competition and a mandate; Republicans, though irrelevant in practice, manage to help kill such a plan with their militant opposition to government-funded healthcare; and progressives, despite having the public behind them, get nothing except brilliantly worded and passionate oratory. Obama may not be able to (or truly want to) deliver a public option, but no one can doubt his ability to deliver a damn good speech.

But special interests often win battles in Washington, that is no surprise. What is so startling about Obama’s repudiation of the major progressive aspect of the bill (single-payer, the choice of progressives, was ceded at the start), was the progressive reaction to the speech. Rather than show disgust and dismay at being slighted, progressives declared the speech a victory. At the Huffington Post, a popular liberal political blog, at least six glowing responses to the speech were posted within hour of its conclusion.

Paul Begala explained “Why I Loved Obama’s Health Care Speech,” in one post. Jacob Heilbrun claimed Obama “came out swinging” and made the “single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades,” in another. From Bill Cunningham: “Tonight, we saw a leader, unafraid to stand and deliver…not a political document, but a platform that all who care about real reform, can support and amend and work for.”

This jubilant tone stretched further into the liberal stratosphere. Katrina vanden Huevel, an unabashed supporter of single-payer healthcare and editor of the Nation — often described as the flagship of the American left — said Obama showed his “progressive spine” with his speech.

On MSNBC, Steve Hilderberg, a former Obama campaign staffer who has been organizing with others former staffers to demand a public option, seemed unperturbed that Obama, for all practical purposes, caved to the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Caucus, who oppose the idea, and not the progressives who elected him.

When asked by Kieth Olberman if Obama’s speech was strong enough, he said “For sure. I never had any doubt, his favor is on the side of the American people and not in bed with special interests … he hit it out of the ballpark.”

But progressives have got to get past the glowing rhetoric, and notice something very important: Obama is going to pass a weak bill. And worse, the slight improvements, in most instances, will not occur for four years.

Surely there is an understandable desire to defend Obama, given that he has been subject to absurd lies and distortions from a right-wing base that has become more delusional and vitriolic by the day. And no doubt, Obama was right to call out the “death panel” fanatics for their pathetic “games” and often racist tirades. Moreover, Obama did articulate a liberal vision of sorts with his soaring explanation of the need for the government to step in when times warrant; and his channeling of the recent passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who viewed healthcare reform as the great unfinished business of his life, was emotional and effective.

But the rhetoric was window dressing; the plan itself is a gift to the powerful, sold as a gift to the masses. Paul Street, writing in Znet, wisely quoted the left-wing version of Christopher Hitchens, who in 1999 said the “the essence of American politics” is the “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Obama has proven to more effective at this manipulation than even Bill Clinton, who Hitchens was referring to with that astute comment.

Sure enough, as the week went on, key congressional supporters of a public option, including Speaker Pelosi, began to, in the words of a New York Times reporter, “drop their insistence,” on it. By Sunday, the New York Times — which, more than any publication in the world sets the news agenda — ran a front-page story, The Fading Public Option, highlighting this trend. Obama’s staff surely must have marveled at how easily they were able to kill the plan, while at the exact same time touting its value. If lives were not at stake — and if was not such a grotesque reminder of the flawed nature of the US political system — one could almost take joy in the political spectacle that was Obama’s speech and the week that followed.

It should be noted that not everybody on the left drank Obama’s brew. Matt Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, rightly chastised the weak direction Obama had taken the bill (”ingenious and disingenuous, naïve and nobody’s fool”), as did John Nichols at the Nation (“Obama Speaks Loudly But Carries a Small Stick”). Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA executive, called a spade a spade, saying if the legislation coming out of the Senate Finance Committee (which does not include a public option) becomes law, it should be renamed the Insurance Industry Profit Protection Act. Rep. Weiner called it a “gift to corporations.” Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, also continued to make the case, with the help of President Clinton’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in a persuasive short film that has been widely circulated online.

But as single-payer supporter, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, noted at Dailykos, the dreary path of healthcare reform seems pretty well laid out.

He writes:

“Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health:

1. House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.

1. The White House will refer to the President’s speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.

1. The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive “co-ops”. Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.

1. The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.

1. House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.

1. The bill will pass, not with a “public option” but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn’t already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.

This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform.”

Only time will tell if Kucinich’s projections are accurate, but it is hard to envision a different script, is it not?

The consequences of Obama’s attitude towards his progressive base go beyond on healthcare reform. If progressives continue to cave in the name of supporting their beloved new president, Emperor Hope, they will continued to be viewed as a non-entity in Washington D.C. on all matters of importance. The mindset of Democratic leaders, and their willingness to walk all over progressives in Congress was described well by blogger Jed Lewison, in a post titled, “Why the Public Option Matters.”

“So you sacrifice the progressives, and you don’t think twice about it. It’s nothing personal. You might not even think it’s the best policy,” he wrote. “But it’s just the way it works, and you’ve got to get something done. So do you it, knowing that it will work. And whether or not you like it, you know that as long as progressives let themselves get steamrolled, that’s always the way it will work.”

Liberal columnist Paul Krugman also put it succinctly. “And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.”

Obama has already shunned his base many times: on cabinet appointments, on Afghanistan, on detention policy, on repealing Bush’s tax cuts, on gay rights and so on. Now he is allowing private insurance companies to dictate healthcare policy. This needs to stop. Because at this rate, progressives insistence on supporting Obama at all costs has become a liability to our democracy and our health.

Just a week removed from Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech about healthcare reform, one can hardly deny the shrewdness of our new president’s rhetorical skills. This is not a good thing.

Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor.

By Michael Corcoran

Boston – President Obama delivered a stirring address to Congress last night, but the federal government’s inability to truly overhaul our broken healthcare system – which now leaves more than 46 million uninsured – is becoming all the more apparent.

Speaking before a joint session of Congress, Obama declared that a public option to compete with private insurers, considered vital by many liberals, was merely a “means to an end,” and not essential to healthcare reform. Earlier this summer, a New York Times/CBS poll showed that 72 percent of Americans support a government-run healthcare plan. But Obama’s speech last night indicates that while a bill will probably pass, prospects for comprehensive reform – the kind millions of Americans voted for – have dimmed rapidly. Insurance companies, which have given large donations to both political parties, are winning the fight in Washington.

The inability of a popular president with substantial majorities in Congress to pass a progressive health bill is immensely frustrating to healthcare activists, and to all who gave Obama a mandate for change.

But their cause is not lost – they just need a new strategy.

Read the rest here:

The Weekly Standard, the country’s preeminent neoconservative magazine, was sold to Clarity Media Group, a Denver-based publishing group, for an undisclosed sum in June (Washington Examiner, 6/17/09). Murdoch’s unloading of the country’s most vigorously pro-war journal marks the end of a particularly sinister and regrettable era in the history of U.S. media.

At a glance, the move may seem unremarkable, given the Standard’s relative size. With a circulation of about 65,000 and annual losses estimated from $1 million (New Yorker, 10/16/06) to $5 million (Forbes, 6/29/09), the Standard represented only a tiny fraction of Murdoch’s vast media empire. Murdoch’s News Corporation, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, took in nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2008 from properties in virtually every sector of the media, including such giants as Fox News Channel, Dow Jones, HarperCollins and MySpace, as well as hundreds of newspapers and television stations across the world.

While it yielded no financial gain for Murdoch and News Corp shareholders, for a time the Standard was arguably the most effective magazine in the nation in terms of its influence on policy. Edited by GOP political operative and neoconservative extraordinaire William Kristol, it had the eyes and ears of prominent members of the new Bush administration, Department of Defense and Congress who drastically escalated the United States’ imperial ambitions. Perhaps no publication was as active or as successful in shaping the propaganda campaign that would enable this remarkable foreign policy transformation to take place.

The journal’s rise to prominence was one of opportunity through tragedy. When the magazine was founded in 1995, neoconservatives were somewhat out of step with mainstream debate in Washington. With the Cold War over, foreign policy was on the back burner, leaving neocons with little to work with. Kristol, along with other prominent bureaucrats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, joined together in The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) to advocate for “regime change” in Iraq and other extreme interventionist policies, but these ideas were considered to be on the fringes of the foreign policy establishment.

Then came the September 11 attacks.

“One day a novel must be written that conveys the sense of purpose and energy that surged through the Standard’s offices…in the the days after September 11, 2001,” wrote Scott McConnell, editor of the isolationist magazine the American Conservative (11/21/05). “For these bookish men, it was a Churchillian moment, an occasion to use words to rally a nation and shape history.”

And shape history is exactly what the staff did. For the next seven years, the Standard would become the birthplace of hawkish foreign policy proposals that would become official U.S. policy; as the magazine fought the war of words in the media, it helped its administration allies fight–and win–the battle of ideas in the White House.

Following the attacks, the Standard advanced what became virtually all the noteworthy tactics of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”: focusing the response to 9/11 on Iraq using flawed and flimsy evidence (11/24/03), widening U.S. foreign policy interventions far and wide (11/01/04), dismissing all calls for even partial withdrawals of U.S. troops (5/10/07), shunning the recommendations of the realist-dominated Iraq Study Group (12/11/06) and escalating troop levels in what became known as “the surge” (1/21/08).

The rhetoric in the Standard’s editorials and articles were often indistinguishable from that of the administration, as it downplayed war crimes committed by U.S. troops (6/12/06) and labeled antiwar activists and legislators as anti-American (8/14/06).

Although U.S. intelligence had found little evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks (McClatchy, 9/22/01), the first Standard released after 9/11 (9/24/01) tellingly featured a cartoon of Saddam Hussein and immediately began making the case for targeting his government: “While it is probably not necessary to go to war with Afghanistan, a broad approach will be required,” wrote Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly. Despite acknowledging that Hussein “might not” have been involved in the 9/11 attacks, “the larger campaign also must go after Saddam Hussein,” said the authors. Weeks later, Max Boot (10/15/01) asked, “Who cares if Saddam was involved?” as he pushed for regime change.

These sentiments were largely shared by a cadre of high-level Bush administration officials, including Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams and Richard Armitage, all of whom–along with Kristol and Weekly Standard contributing editor Robert Kagan–had signed a letter for PNAC urging Clinton to overthrow Hussein in the late 1990s (PNAC, 1/26/98).

In case Congress or the American public did not share Boot’s attitude, the Standard did all it could to find (or invent) evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. One high-profile article, “Case Closed” (11/24/03), earned public praise from the vice president, who called it the “best source of information” detailing this supposed relationship (Rocky Mountain News, 1/9/04). Cheney’s endorsement is now touted in an editor’s note atop the online version of the article. (Hayes later grew this sophistry into the 2004 book The Connection: How Al-Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.) In 2005, Hayes, along with Thomas Joscelyn, contributed another 10,000 words in an article titled “The Mother of All Connections” (7/18/05). Hayes would later be hand-picked to write Cheney’s official biography (Guardian, 9/04/06).

Of course, it is now widely understood that these supposed connections were spurious, having been debunked by every government body that has looked into the matter, including the Pentagon (Institute for Defense Analyses, 11/07) and the Senate Intelligence Committee (6/08).

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