Edmund Wright is right - awful beats the alternative. Flawed beats flip flop any day.(See 1 below.)
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Why the quibbling over the words socialism and socialist. In Britain it is a common term, used frequently and out in the open. So Adam Shaw urges Americans to suck it up but continue to recognize it but remember socialism is an awful way to do run a nation. (See 1a below.)
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Ahmadinejad beats war drums and calls a meeting of all Arab malcontents. (See 2 below.)
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Russia got Obama to back off America's commitment to place defensive missiles in Poland and leaves us holding the bag vis a vis meaningful sanctions. Consequently, U.S. and Israel sit down and discuss toothless sanctions of a financial nature but nothing related to a military strike on the agenda. (See 2a below.)
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California Republican candidate's support of Israel comes into question. Tom Campbell's honorary chairman is the former Sec. of State, George Shultz, one of Israel's best friends and, in my book, a fine Sec. of State.
Politics is a nasty business and all too often placing a candidate on the defensive over some accusation is used by opponents to gain an advantage. I do not know this is what is happening but one could infer as much.(See 3 below.)
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Charlie Gasparino believes Obama just threw adviser Volcker under the bus. (See 4 below.)
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Daily Beast Blog writer flogs Obama's staff and says they must resign or be fired. (See 5 below.)
When Democrats were out of office they thought 'reconciliation' was terrible. Now that they are in power these same politicians, who protested against it, now see it as their weapon of choice. Hypocrisy is alive and well in Disney East! This according to an Investor Business Daily Editorial. (See 6 below.)
Some varied views of the health care charade.
Obama reminded the attendees and the public that he was president in a characteristic pissy fanny moment.
Since Democrats won't agree to start over to possibly produce a sensible bill they seem intent on passing something that is an abomination so they can claim a petulant political victory? (See 7, 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d.)
Dick
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1)Worse than Awful
By C. Edmund Wright
The debate over third parties and how bad the Republicans are comes down to this: evil versus awful. That's it. Your next Congress and your next president will be either from the evil party or the awful party. Whatever perfect virginal party that is out there yet to be formed will not come to fruition in time to save the republic.
Besides, no one in politics is perfect, and virgins are almost equally rare.
Threatened with the loss of liberty with the "fundamental change" on the way from the Obama crowd, none of us on the right should luxuriate in irrelevant and phony purity. There's a reason they call government "making sausage." No one who has ever actually been in the sausage factory can remain pure. You can only do that if you remain irrelevant. Irrelevance will not stop the evil of a government take over of our society.
Irrelevance is cathartic. It feels good. It is liberating. It is still irrelevant. A progressive Republican may sometimes be awful, but it is not the same thing as a progressive Democrat. (Please see 2009 health care vote for some recent compelling evidence.) These differences have real impact on everybody's freedom.
Newbies to this history-making movement may assume that they are the first Americans to ever have this anti-Washington outrage. Our schools and media certainly have not emphasized these traditions. It is somewhat analogous to Obama thinking American history started at his birth and American greatness started at his inauguration.
Consider that it was precisely the conservatives within the Republican Party who sounded the loudest alarms against Obama. And by "within the Republican Party," I include party officials, elected officials, media figures and voters who readily identify themselves as Republicans. These are all people "within the Republican party."
It is a mistake to judge the national party by Michael Steele and his staff. Most folks who insist on doing this cannot name another person who ever held this job. It is not relevant. It is a glorified fund raising admin job.
And it is no secret that McCain and others like David Brooks and Colin Powell were blind to who Obama was in varying degrees. But so were so many independents and moderates and un-affiliated voters who are suddenly enlightened.
Suddenly enlightened? Yes. Remember, Obama won in 2008 but would lose today.
As flawed as many Republicans are -- and I have written extensively on this very subject on this very website -- the folks who were right about Obama were the not so flawed Republicans. The very folks who rightly warned of a government run by the terrible tri-fecta of Obama-Reid-Pelosi were mostly the same folks who warned of the dangers of having folks like McCain represent the party.
And what did those prescient Republicans get for being right? They were ridiculed and lampooned by the Beltway pundits, pollsters and strategists who said that making this clarion call was a huge mistake. The independents and neophytes rejected this warning by the Republican right and voted in droves for Obama. Others "disgusted with both parties" stayed home.
And guess what? Every single one of them now is governed by Obama, Reid and Pelosi. How did that equal disgust with both parties work out for them?
Not well. After a year, many have decided they do not like it. They have decided now to join the outrage over the liberal -- er progressive -- takeover of the nation.
Welcome. We've been waiting for you.
History and perspective are critical here. They teach us this: that today's choice is between the awful Republican Party and the evil Democratic Party. Awful can be rehabilitated, starting with the good that is in the party. It has happened twice in the last 30 years. Evil is evil. Period. There is a difference.
And one should never harp on the awfulness of the Republican progressives without praising the Republican conservatives. Moreover, it is critical that you contrast the evil left as the only other option. Perfection is not on the ballot. I didn't create the situation of evil versus awful. Facts are stubborn things.
History always teaches us this too: that under Reagan, the GOP was barely in control of the conservatives yet magnificent and long lasting good was done for us and freedom everywhere. Today, it's barely under the control of the moderates. The needed change is not that difficult. Regardless, we must make it because the GOP is the only thing between us and a socialist state.
Scott Brown's cloture vote was awful. If he votes for the actual bill, that would be more awful. Call it that. I'll join you. No, I'll beat you to it. Together we can try and purge this thing from the party and shift more influence to the Rubios and the DeMints and the Coburns and many, many other greats in the awful party.
But Coakely or Kennedy would have matched Brown's cloture vote and gone him one better with a vote for evil Obama Care. Take your choice. It's all you have currently.
1a) Obama's Socialism
By Adam Shaw
Recently on "The O'Reilly Factor," Bill O'Reilly seemed very concerned about President Obama being described as a socialist by members of the right such as Rush Limbaugh. O'Reilly has often dodged calling the president a socialist, as if doing so would condemn Obama as a tyrannical dictator. It was discussed throughout the show with various guests, and O'Reilly frequently stated that yes, Obama is a far-left guy, but he didn't want to use the actual term "socialist." It would be too much.
Here in Britain we look at the continuing battle as to whether Obama is a socialist or not as a rather odd American quibble. In Britain we have no problem defining people as socialists, nor do people on the left have a problem calling themselves socialists. It is not that those of us on the conservative right do not believe that socialism is a bad doctrine. We do, and we see evidence of its continual destruction of the country on a day-to-day basis, but we have always had socialism living quite openly amongst us. We are therefore able to see and recognize it quite calmly as a day-to-day occurrence in politics, just as one recognizes the flu. We wish it didn't exist, but it does, and so we get on with our lives, trying to avoid catching it in the process.
When one looks back at the prime ministers that the British Labour Party has produced in the twentieth century -- James Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan etc. -- all have defined themselves as socialists at one time or another. Even the relatively centrist Tony Blair described himself as "Coming to Socialism through Marxism" and is a member of the Christian Socialist Movement. When one considers that Blair is widely considered to sit on the "right" of the Labour party, it becomes clear how deeply the Labour Party is rooted in socialism. Moreover, from 1918 until 1994, Labour's famous Clause IV of its Constitution defined its aim as follows:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that maybe possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means ofproduction, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainablesystem of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
This succinct definition of socialism was seen as the defining purpose of the Labour Party and was printed on the back of every membership card. During Labour's so-called "shift to the centre" after Blair's ascendancy to the leadership in 1994, it controversially rewrote Clause IV to read:
The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.
Even amidst the fury of the hard left of the party, who saw the change as a movement away from the party's Marxist roots, the re-envisioned "New Labour" still defined itself as a socialist party (even if it squeezed "democratic" into the definition to soften the blow) and still does to this day.
The current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has also defined himself as a socialist[1] and admitted to adhering to socialist policies, as do a great deal of his top Cabinet ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, who believes thatLabour should talk up the massive redistribution of wealth it has achieved, and the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, who stated recently that "[s]ocialism, as represented by the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Co-operative movement, is a tradition I can be proud of.
"In Great Britain, and across Western Europe, it will not raise any eyebrows for a leading politician to describe himself as a socialist. Definitions of socialism range widely across the world, whether one is a democratic socialist, a socialist democrat, a liberal socialist, a Christian socialist, or the theatrical "Luxemburgist Trotskyist, post-Trotskyist" of Christopher Hitchens. We in Europe know that the definitions of what a socialist is depend on the socialist. As British scholar Robert Service has commented on the subject of left-wing organization, "Grandiose names were chosen for organizations which were little larger than crepuscules"[2].
There are as many exact definitions of socialism as there are socialists. Yet they do have common characteristics. Love of big government, nationalization of industry, massive taxation, wealth redistribution, etc. all point towards socialism. Someone like the president would not even have to say he was a socialist in Western Europe; it would be assumed quite normally, without any fuss or conspiracy.
I have a lot of respect for Bill O'Reilly, but to a Brit who has seen his fair share of socialists and lives in a socialist country run by a self-described socialist party by a self-described socialist prime minister who has taken over for another self-described socialist prime minister, it is puzzling why self-described independents like Mr O'Reilly are doing backflips in an attempt to avoid the obvious fact -- President Obama is quite clearly a socialist.
All these verbal gymnastics that are used to avoid stating the obvious may be rather humorous for someone watching from over the Atlantic, but for Americans, such delusion is a very serious matter. It is important, not just for the American right, but for the American people as a whole, to realise just exactly who it is they have elected to office. With the approval numbers dropping almost daily for the president, it appears that it is sinking in for the generally center-right American public.
However, when people on the right start being "concerned" about describing Obama as what he clearly is, in part due to the hysteria that both sides of the political spectrum exhibit when the word "socialist" is used, then it damages the effectiveness of opposition to him. Instead of being able to define what Obama's aims are in his presidency, those on the left and on the right keep pushing Obama into a slightly left-of-center, non-ideological fog. Such a political move is deceitful, and it does not allow the American public to get a clear perception of just what they have voted into the White House.
Those of us across the pond who analyze American politics know exactly who it is you have in the White House. Obama is not some new post-political entity. Nor is he some form of Stalinist that will set up a USSA. He is a normal, well-spoken, charismatic socialist who in Britain would sit quite happily towards the left of the Labour Party alongside figures such as Tony Benn, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, and Ed Balls. To call someone a socialist is not conspiratorial, and it is not fear-mongering; it is simply the truth, and it is time for some in the conservative media to take a deep breath and admit it -- America has a socialist leading the country. Welcome to the club: It stinks!
Adam Shaw is an English writer specializing in politics and religion.
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2)Arab Islamist and terror chiefs called to Tehran for anti-Israel war planning: Iran will chop off the hands of attackers.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has summoned all the terrorist groups Tehran sponsors - Islamist and radical Palestinian - for a broad gathering Saturday, Feb. 27, to finalize their roles in military operations against Israel in the event of a Middle East conflagration. This was reported Iranian and intelligence sources.
It will be the sequel to the preliminary discussions Ahmadinejad held with Syrian president Bashar Assad and heads of the Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian Hamas Thursday, Feb. 25, during a brief visit to Damascus.
The guests of honor at the Tehran parley will be Hamas leader politburo chief Khaled Meshaal and Hizballah deputy leader Naim Kassem.
The Lebanese Shiite group's secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah will not be there because he never leaves his Beirut bunker for fear Israeli assassins will catch up with him, especially since the high-profile Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed mysteriously in Dubai last month.
And Nasrallah is not alone; some of his fellow terror chiefs hesitate to show their faces outside their strongholds - even in friendly Tehran - since the Dubai police disclosed that three of the suspects in the Mabhouh killing, carriers of Australian passports, departed Dubai for Iran. They were said to have travelled by sea ferry to Bandar Abbas, central headquarters of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, before flying out of Tehran international airport to unknown Far East destinations.
The Arab terrorist chiefs infer that even the Iranian capital and Revolutionary Guards headquarters are no longer secure against penetration by the Hamas commander's assassins.
The Iranians have therefore decided that their official statement on the conference, due to end Monday, March 1, will name only a few of the participants; the presence of many other key figures will be kept secret
According to debkafile’s Iranian sources, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, assisted by a large team of aides, will lead the proceedings and steer them toward conclusions and decisions in line with Iran’s regional goals. The conference, called to pull together Iran and its allies' preparations for war with Israel, will be presented officially as an effort to reconcile the feuding Palestinian factions.
Few will find this believable, especially when Hamas attends the conference on its own, except for several radical Palestinian splinter groups, and representatives of the rival Fatah and Palestinian Authority were not invited.
Presidential bureau personnel have performed most of the staff work on planning and the roles assigned the various organizations in any conflict with Israeli and/or Israeli forces. Senior members of the Revolutionary Guards and other sections of Iran's armed forces will be recruited to chair discussion panels and subcommittees aided by specialists in guerrilla and terror warfare.
2a) Israel, US hold strategic talks on Iran
By HERB KEINON
Comes after Russia says it opposes “paralyzing” sanctions aimed at energy sector.
Israel and the US were holding a one-day, high-level strategic dialogue on Thursday expected to focus on sanctions against Iran, a day after Russia announced it opposes “paralyzing” sanctions aimed at the Islamic Republic’s energy sector.
A week after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu returned from Moscow, where he publicly called for “crippling sanctions” and “sanctions with teeth” against Iranian energy exports and imports, Oleg Rozhkov, the deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s security and disarmament department, said that Moscow would not back “crippling or paralyzing” sanctions that could lead to the “political or economic or financial isolation” of Iran.
According to Reuters, Rozhkov – when asked by a reporter what sanctions Russia might support – replied, “Those that are directed at resolving non-proliferation questions linked to Iran’s nuclear program.
“What relation to nonproliferation is there in forbidding banking activities with Iran?” he asked. “This is a financial blockade. And oil and gas. These sanctions are aimed only at paralyzing the country and paralyzing the regime.”
Despite these comments, the Israeli and US teams on Thursday had been expected to concentrate on the issue of sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear program. A possible military strike is not expected to be discussed, since Washington has made clear that while it might need to be discussed in the future, the military option is not now on the agenda.
There is currently no known discussion between Israel and the US, at any level, about military action, even though over the years both countries have said that it should not be taken off the table.
In Washington, meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Iran’s continuing refusal to provide more information on its nuclear program had left the international community “little choice” but to impose new, tough sanctions on Teheran.
In congressional testimony on Wednesday, Clinton said Iran’s failure to accept the Obama administration’s offers of engagement and prove its nuclear intentions were peaceful had given the US and its partners new resolve in pressuring Teheran to comply with international demands through fresh penalties.
“We have pursued a dual-track approach to Iran that has exposed its refusal to live up to its responsibilities and helped us achieve a new unity with our international partners,” she told the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“Iran has left the international community little choice but to impose greater costs and pressure in the face of its provocative steps. We are now working actively with our partners to prepare and implement new measures to pressure Iran to change its course,” Clinton said, in comments that seemed at odds with Rozhkov’s statement in Moscow.
Netanyahu’s office had no comment on Rozhkov’s remarks, while one government official said Israel would likely seek clarification from the Kremlin.
The position articulated by Rozhkov runs contrary to the impression Netanyahu gave reporters last week in Moscow when, after meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he said the feeling toward sanctions in Moscow today was dramatically different than it was 10 months ago.
Clinton addressed the possibility that Congress might impose its own sanctions on Iran, besides those the US was seeking through the UN Security Council. Congressional sanctions might be tougher than any for which the United States could win international approval at the UN, but the US wants international backing for its tough stance against Iran and sees the UN penalties as a powerful symbol of world resolve against an Iranian bomb.
The comments from Moscow came as a bit of a surprise, as top officials both in Washington and Jerusalem have expressed optimism in recent weeks that significant nonmilitary action, such as “crippling” sanctions, could have a real impact on Teheran.
The Israeli delegation to Thursday’s strategic dialogue in Jerusalem will be led by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, while the US team will be headed by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg. This is the first meeting of the strategic dialogue framework, which was set up in 1999, since Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama came into office.
The meeting comes as both Jerusalem and Washington believe that Iran is making its international position more difficult by continuing to talk about enriching uranium to higher levels. While it is unclear exactly which way China – which holds a veto on the UN Security Council – will vote on sanctions, there is a growing sense that it would be unlikely to buck the will of most of the rest of the world – and the other permanent members of the Security Council – and scuttle sanctions. This assessment is largely based on previous Chinese behavior and Beijing’s general reticence to defy international consensus.
A high-level Israeli delegation, led by Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, left for Beijing on Wednesday to lobby on behalf of sanctions.
In the run-up to the Security Council sanctions vote, expected sometime in March, the US is doing its utmost to distance itself from any hint that sanctions were intended for regime change in Teheran, and not only to stop the nuclear program. The fear is that this could chase both Russia and China away from supporting a fourth round of sanctions.
For instance, Rozhkov told reporters on Wednesday that “Russia isn’t working or participating in actions which should lead to overthrowing the existing regime. We are working with the US and others... only to solve those concerns we have regarding Iranian nuclear efforts.”
Also on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that a delay in delivering air-defense missiles to Iran was connected with concerns about regional tensions.
Russia signed a contract in 2007 to sell S-300 missiles to Iran, a move that would substantially boost the country’s defense capacities and make an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities more difficult.
Lavrov, when asked about the delivery, said Russia never takes “any actions leading to the destabilization of this or that region. All deliveries of Russian weapons abroad follow from the need to strictly respect this principle.”
It marks the first time Russia has publicly called into question the wisdom of honoring its contractual obligations to Iran. Various Russian defense officials had suggested in recent weeks, including the day before Netanyahu went to Moscow last week, that the commitment to supply the missiles would be fulfilled.
When pressed on the specific reason for the missile holdup, Lavrov broadened the question by referring to arms sales by any country to South America, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
“There are certain principles we need to be guided by when selling arms,” he said. “We cannot sell weapons if it will destabilize any of these regions.”
Netanyahu, asked after his meeting last week with President Dmitry Medvedev whether he had received assurances that Moscow would not supply the weapons systems, said, “I trust what I heard from the president of Russia. I trust him because I know that in this issue, Russia is guided by concerns about regional stability.”
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3)U.S.-Israel relations raised in California's Senate race — by conservatives
By Seema Mehta
Bigger concern for candidate is less with Jewish voters
In a dispute that commingles foreign policy and a quest for political advantage, U.S.-Israel relations have taken an unexpectedly central role in the California race for Senate.
Rivals in the race for the Republican nomination are questioning whether former Rep. Tom Campbell is sufficiently supportive of Israel. They base their criticisms on his voting record, statements about a Palestinian homeland and capital, and some of his past associates.
Their allegations have raised enough concerns for Campbell that he plans to meet with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He also is reaching out to other Jewish leaders. His campaign's honorary chairman, former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, weighed in to call Campbell's support for the nation "unwavering."
"He clearly understands the very real threats facing the Israeli people, all the more urgent now as Iran rushes toward nuclear arms," Shultz said in a statement released to the Los Angeles Times. "Tom Campbell's record of action tells you where he stands, and I stand with him."
The two other major Republican primary contestants, former businesswoman Carly Fiorina and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, have launched criticisms of Campbell. The rhetoric has grown so heated that a prominent supporter of Campbell's has accused Fiorina's campaign manager of calling Campbell an "anti-Semite." The campaign manager denies having used the epithet.
The debate over Campbell's Israel credentials, which has been roiling on Jewish and conservative Web sites, is a rare one in American politics, and even less frequent in Republican primaries compared to Democratic competitions, said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a former GOP political operative.
"Support for Israel is a pretty universal concept among Republicans," he said. "Support for Israel is a pretty broad-based concept in American politics."
But more than foreign policy appeared to be at play. Evangelical Christians have a strong affinity for the state of Israel, for secular political reasons and because support for it is emphasized in the Bible. For years surveys have shown evangelical support for Israel far outweighs that of the general population — and evangelicals are a key bloc among Republican primary voters.
"The bigger concern for Campbell is less with Jewish voters than with religious conservatives," Schnur said.
The dispute has caused at least one dispute among prominent Republicans. Former California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said in an interview that when he called Fiorina manager Marty Wilson to tell Wilson he planned to endorse Campbell, Wilson replied, "Bruce, how can you do that? He's an anti-Semite."
McPherson, who said he would have endorsed Fiorina if Campbell wasn't in the race, said he was stunned. He and Campbell have known each other for more than two decades, he said, and Campbell has never given any such indication.
"As a matter of fact, I know he's a strong supporter of the state of Israel," McPherson said.
Wilson denied making the comment.
"That's not true, absolutely not," he said, adding that he does not believe Campbell is anti-Semitic. "That's crazy."
Wilson said he discussed the endorsement with McPherson, but did not recall discussing Israel.
"It's uncharacteristic of Bruce to sit there and make that kind of a claim," Wilson said, adding that he had known McPherson for years.
Criticism of Campbell's voting record centers on efforts to reduce foreign aid for Israel. While in Congress, Campbell said, he supported military aid for Israel but twice sought to reduce economic aid.
In the late 1990s, when foreign aid to other nations was being cut to help balance the budget, Israel's allocation was not affected. Campbell said he favored allowing the military aid to remain unchanged but slightly reducing economic aid.
A second instance occurred when he voted against giving Israel an additional $30 million in economic aid, which was to have been taken from funds set aside for the neediest nations, such as those in Africa. That money, he said, was on top of a $700-million aid request that he supported, and an earlier $3-billion appropriation.
Campbell noted that he has traveled to various African nations to teach and has seen firsthand how much difference even a small amount of money could accomplish.
"I remember the mayor of a village in northern Malawi came out to thank us for a little water pump. It was probably under $50 and it allowed the water from the river to be brought to this area," Campbell said. "You don't forget things like that."
Campbell also drew criticism in the past for saying that Jerusalem should be the shared capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state. He said in the interview that he stands by that view.
His opponents also questioned Campbell's past associates, notably Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiring to help a terrorist organization. Al-Arian had donated $1,300 to Campbell's 2000 campaign for Senate. Campbell, who was the business school dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at Chapman University, wrote a letter to the University of South Florida protesting its decision to fire Al-Arian because of controversial comments. He also visited Al-Arian's brother in jail.
Campbell said he did not know about Al-Arian's illegal activities at the time, and if he had he would not have written the letter.
"None of that had come out," he said. Al-Arian was also photographed with George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, Campbell noted.
Jewish leaders expressed confidence that Campbell is not anti-Semitic, but said he was not regarded as a "friend of Israel."
"He's a brilliant gentlemen and an engaging personality and I don't think he's particularly pro-Israel," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who has known Campbell since the 1980s. "I think there's enough there on the record that would send real alarms that this is someone who maybe doesn't fully understand, doesn't fully value or fully support a strong ongoing relationship with the state of Israel, an alliance with the state of Israel."
Campbell called his opponents' efforts to undermine his Israel record "unacceptable," and singled out Wilson's alleged comment to McPherson as "reckless and irresponsible."
"It's also personally hurtful," he added
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4)How Obama Screwed Volcker
By Charlie Gasparino
The president needed the gravitas of the former Fed chairman to sell his bank reform to Wall Street. And when the “Volcker Rule” didn’t fly, Obama sold him out.
Barack Obama owes Paul Volcker a lot, but he apparently owes the fat cats on Wall Street even more. That’s the only reasonable conclusion that can be made from the president’s timely and, in some ways, bizarre about-face on the former Fed chairman’s plans to reform the financial industry and prevent another meltdown.
As first reported by the New York Post, Volcker’s bank-reform idea—the one trotted out by the president with Volcker standing at his side just hours after Republican Scott Brown won Teddy Kennedy’s seat and vowed to help crush Obama’s economic agenda—has been nixed in favor of a watered-down version that bank chiefs like J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other Obama supporters on Wall Street are advocating.
I am told that both Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, good friends of Wall Street, considered the 82-year-old Volcker little more than a crank who should be ignored. And so he was.
The Volcker Plan, as I have reported in The Daily Beast, certainly had its shortcomings; its main emphasis was to stop banks that are deemed Too Big to Fail from engaging in so-called proprietary trading, or engaging in risky trades with their own capital—the theory being that taxpayers would again have to bail out the banks if their bets turned sour, as they did in 2007 and 2008.
The problem with the proposal was that proprietary trading wasn’t the major reason for all those big losses that led to the financial collapse and the taxpayer bailouts.
Yet for all its drawbacks, at least the Volcker Plan was the start of a conversation about whether taxpayers should be forced to subsidize the risk-taking activities of Wall Street. That debate, as we know now, is over. Sources tell me a coalition of Wall Street heavyweights from Dimon to people like Larry Fink, the head of money-management powerhouse BlackRock—Obama supporters all—made their opposition to the plan well-known to the administration.
The message was clear: Wall Street, which helped elect Barack Obama with an unprecedented support for a Democratic presidential candidate (Goldman Sachs was the second largest contributor to the president’s campaign), was ready to start backing the opposition of the so-called Volcker Rule. The bottom line: Even as Main Street struggles with severe unemployment, Wall Street still wants its billions in bonuses.
And with that, Volcker, one of the nation’s great economists, was thrown under the bus. Of course, the administration is still pushing for “reform” of the banking system to prevent another meltdown, but by all accounts, the measures floated so far will do nothing more than force the firms to hold a little more capital if they want to roll the dice in the markets. The main thrust of what Volcker wanted to do and needs to be done—prevent the American taxpayer from ever again having to subsidized banks' risk taking—appears nowhere to be found.
Of course, you don’t have to be a political junkie to understand why the president did a 180 on Volcker and his plan; already, Wall Street has begun to hedge its bets by supporting some Republicans, and it isn’t a good thing having someone as powerful as Jamie Dimon, a lifelong Democrat and Obama supporter, against you. (People close to Dimon say while he still supports the president, he’s also angered by some of his agenda.)
Even so, there was something particularly smarmy about how the former Fed chairman was used. Volcker’s greatest achievement was defeating an economic calamity known as stagflation—the combination of high unemployment and high inflation—that scorched the American economy in the late 1970s, and threatened the country’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
Volcker left the Fed in the mid-1980s and since then has been sounding the alarm bells on all those financial “innovations” that blew up in 2008 and still haunt the banking system. He hated one of the greatest of these “innovations”: the creation of the financial supermarket model of banking that combined risk-taking trading activities with federally insured deposits. If Volcker had his way, there would have been no Citigroup, one of the most costly of the bailed-out banks, and we would have been all better off for it.
In 2007, Volcker became an early supporter of then-candidate Obama. I am told Volcker believed Obama had the temperament to tackle the massive spending in Washington—remember, while campaigning, Obama often sounded right of George Bush on fiscal matters, and in reforming the banking system. When Volcker publicly announced that he was supporting Obama, he lent economic credibility to a candidate that his Republican challenger John McCain said would spend the country into economic oblivion.
Obama rewarded Volcker with an allegedly senior role in his economic team. I use the word "allegedly" because for the most part he was being ignored, particularly as he began pushing his ideas to prevent banks that are backed by the federal government from handling customers’ deposits that are insured by the government and still take risks in the markets by trading bonds.
I am told that both Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, good friends of Wall Street, considered the 82-year-old Volcker little more than a crank who should be ignored. And so he was—that is until Scott Brown’s victory. The popular theory about Brown’s victory was that it was a vote against Obama’s health-care reform. That’s only part of the story; the same president who publicly called Wall Street CEOs “fat cats” was now being accused of aiding and abetting Wall Street’s huge bonus pools, while unemployment remains near 10 percent.
It didn’t take the American public long to figure out that when you deem all these banks too big to fail, and then subsidize their long-term debt and keep interest rates close to zero, they will make money hand over fist.
That’s why just hours after the Brown victory, it was such an enticing photo-op for the president to be standing next to Volcker, the wise old man who has been accurately decrying Wall Street risk-taking for years.
Then reality set in. Those same fat cats threatened to pull their support for a president who will no doubt need all the support he can get given the state of the economy and his rapidly evaporating agenda of stalled health-care reform and failed economic policies.
And just like that, the wise old man became the crazy uncle that no one listens to anymore.
Charlie Gasparino is a senior correspondent for Fox Business Network. He is a columnist for The Daily Beast and a frequent contributor to the New York Post, Forbes, and other publications. His new book about the financial crisis, The Sellout, was published by HarperBusiness.
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5) Obama, Fire Your Staff!
By Sean Wilentz
The White House The president needs to learn an important lesson, says historian Sean Wilentz: Sometimes the most loyal staffers are the most destructive to a commander in chief’s agenda.
Now that President Obama has confronted some harsh political realities over health-care reform and has seen his public-approval ratings fall down to earth, he can do many things to set his administration on a fresh course. He might begin, though, by heeding some lessons of history. Like too many unsuccessful presidents, he has surrounded himself in the Oval Office with a select coterie of campaign loyalists from Chicago politics and his former Senate office. As Politico editor John Harris reported Jan. 22, this inner circle consists of “romantics” who are enveloped by pettiness, grandiosity, and hero worship left over from the 2008 primaries and general election.
Successful presidents understand cardinal rules about running the White House that unsuccessful presidents do not. It is almost always important for the president to leave behind many from the inner circle.
• Leslie H. Gelb: Rumbling Over Rahm Emanuel Unable to shift out of campaign mode, Harris writes, the president’s confidants are driven by “a basic attitude toward Clinton-style governance [that] is hostile,” even though one member of the Cabinet is named Clinton and an array of veterans of the Bill Clinton administration are on Obama’s staff—including White House Chief of Staff and former Chicago Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who, according to a recent Financial Times report, “treats Cabinet principals like minions.” By seeing their own world starkly, as the stage for a dramatic struggle of world-historic, “transformational” proportions, these would-be saints close to the president have embraced fantasies of transcendence that have yielded to needless factionalism within the Democratic Party and inside Obama’s administration: Blue Dogs versus liberals, idealists versus pragmatists, as well as, evidently, dueling bands of White House insiders.
History, alas, is filled with examples of insular White House palace guards undermining presidents’ political survival as they seek to shield him from influences other than themselves. The resulting problems are far more serious than a couple of gatecrashers at a State Dinner. Invariably, true believers fall to fighting among themselves. In an obviously well-sourced column on Feb. 21 in response to The Daily Beast’s Leslie H. Gelb, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post defended Emanuel while urging the firing of others. “Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter,” Milbank wrote. “…Obama’s problem is that his other confidants—particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod—are part of the Cult of Obama.”
Milbank and Gelb are right that change is called for. Successful presidents understand cardinal rules about running the White House that unsuccessful presidents do not. It is almost always important for the president to leave behind many from the inner circle who helped win the election. The group that excelled in the politics of campaigning is usually not well-suited to the politics of governing. Carrying forward grudges, perceived slights, and personal alliances can only hamper the president from consolidating leadership of his party, let alone of the nation. Being surrounded by adoring aides who consider themselves a tough-minded Praetorian Guard for having helped win one campaign inculcates habits of exclusivity and exclusion that lead presidents self-destructively into the bunker when the going gets tough, which it always does. When the initial group of advisers causes strain among the team or has depleted whatever talents or ideas it might have, successful presidents remove it and seek replacements in circles very different from those from which the failed, exhausted, or abrasive advisers came.
Telling examples of these imperatives come from the presidencies of two men whom President Obama has often cited, politics and ideology aside, as models: Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. When Lincoln became president, he freed himself from the Illinois politicos who had paved the way for his nomination and election and instead sought intelligence from a broad array of office holders and military men. He did not forget the men who had elected him—he named his campaign manager, David Davis, to the Supreme Court in 1862—but neither did Lincoln cloister himself within a White House inner circle. Nor was Lincoln afraid to dump appointees. In 1862, he forced the resignation of his politically influential but not very capable secretary of War, Simon Cameron, and replaced him with the unlikely Edwin Stanton, the attorney general in the previous Democratic administration whose contemptuous opinion of Lincoln was well-known. Nevertheless, Lincoln and Stanton forged a superbly effective partnership.
Ronald Reagan named as his first chief of staff James Baker III, the campaign manager of his bitter rival for the Republican nomination in 1980, George H.W. Bush, himself chosen as vice president in what proved a political masterstroke. The pragmatic Baker proved enormously effective, especially in getting much of Reagan’s conservative domestic agenda enacted during his first term while curbing Reagan’s more conservative political aides and supporters from California. Thereafter, whenever an appointee caused difficulty, regardless of political affinity or personal relationship, Reagan sacked him and looked in a very different direction to find fresh blood, replacing Alexander Haig with George Shultz as secretary of State, Edwin Meese with Richard Thornburgh as attorney general, and Donald Regan with Howard Baker as his third chief of staff.
The presidential exception that proves the rule was John F. Kennedy, whose special bond with his brother, Robert, lasted beyond the 1960 campaign and proved of vital importance after RFK became attorney general. But after the Bay of Pigs, of course, JFK did not fail to remove CIA Director Allen Dulles. More typical was Jimmy Carter, who brought many members of his so-called Georgia Mafia with him to the White House, stuck by them loyally, and in time found himself isolated and confused within his own political bubble. By the time he awoke to his difficulties, Carter reacted by blaming the American people’s psychology for the “crisis of confidence” (in his notorious “malaise” speech), and then appeared to panic by immediately demanding letters of resignation from his entire Cabinet, of which he eventually accepted five.
If the president will not shake up his inner circle, he at least ought to start expanding it and talking seriously with a host of people well outside his comfort zone, much as Lincoln and Reagan—as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who operated through a constantly changing cast of characters—did before him. Staff changes may not be enough to reverse the looming legislative mess over health-care reform, or even win back the support he has lost among traditional Democratic voters in time for the midterm elections. And timing in these matters is delicate. But only the president is indispensable. If a staff shakeup—an obvious measure employed by all successful presidents—does not prove sufficient, it is certainly necessary, and inevitable sooner rather than later if the president is to achieve much of anything, preventing the unmaking of both his own administration and his party.
Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University whose books include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and historian-in-residence at Bob Dylan's official Web site.
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6)The Raw Hypocrisy Of Reconciliation
Democracy: Republicans are being warned they must help pass the Democrats' health reform or face the "nuclear option" preventing filibusters. But when in the minority, Democrats called such threats undemocratic.
As a powerful senior Democratic senator in 2005, Vice President Joseph Biden condemned bending Senate rules to prevent the minority from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominations.
"I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now," Biden said on the Senate floor in the gravest of tones. "But you won't own it forever, and I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing."
The vice president's prayers have apparently gone unheard. The White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are mulling their chances of ramming through a big-government health reform through abuse of the budget reconciliation process.
Thanks to the election last month of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Democrats lost their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the upper house. But using reconciliation would require only a simple majority in the Senate.
The Biden comment is just one of a series of samples of televised statements of leading Democrats, mostly from Senate floor speeches, gathered together by Naked Emperor News and featured on the Breitbart.tv Web site.
Nothing so far in the yearlong debate on health reform has exposed the Democrats' rank hypocrisy as much as the viewing of these past statements condemning as an unconstitutional power grab what they now propose to do.
Reid this week jeered that Republicans should "stop crying about reconciliation." But during the Bush administration, today's most prominent Democrats were singing an entirely different tune:
• "This is the way democracy ends," now-Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., warned his colleagues on May 19, 2005, "not with a bomb, but with a gavel."
In sharp variance to that, the Associated Press reported last year that if a bipartisan deal on health reform "falls apart, Democrats will have to turn to the 'nuclear option' — forcing through an inferior bill through a process that only requires 51 votes instead of 60, Baucus said."
• Then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on April 25, 2005, said that bypassing the filibuster through the nuclear option "really I think would change the character of the Senate forever." Back then, Obama claimed "you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
• Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York on May 23, 2005, from the Senate floor blasted that "this president has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said, 'Change the rules! Do it the way I want it done!'
"And I guess there just weren't very many voices on the other side of the aisle that acted the way previous generations of senators have acted and said, 'Mr. President, we're with you, we support you, but that's a bridge too far. We can't go there. You have to restrain yourself, Mr. President.'"
The Senate, Clinton argued, "is being asked to turn itself inside out, to ignore the precedent, to ignore the way our system has worked, the delicate balance that we have obtained, that has kept this constitutional system going — for immediate gratification of the present president."
• On March 18, 2005, from the floor, New York Sen. Charles Schumer declared that the nation was "on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis."
He asserted that "the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing. It's almost a temper tantrum," Schumer said of what he and other Democrats are trying to do now.
"They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution so that they will get their way," he added.
• Reid on May 18, 2005, from the Senate floor said the "right to extended debate is never more important than when one party controls Congress and the White House" — exactly the situation now in 2010. He added that "in these cases a filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government."
• According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, taking to the floor on May 18, 2005, "the nuclear option, if successful, will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority."
She went on to warn that "it begins with judicial nominations. Next will be executive appointments. And then legislation." It would mean "the Senate becomes ipso facto the House of Representatives, where the majority rules supreme, and the party in power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power."
Today, it is indeed legislation, in the form of their health care bill, to which Feinstein and other Democrats want to apply the nuclear option.
• Then-Sen Biden's floor speech was May 23, 2005, and he called the nuclear option "ultimately an example of the arrogance of power" and "a fundamental power grab."
• "I don't know of a single piece of legislation that's ever been adopted here," an angry Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said on the floor on May 18, 2005, "that didn't have a Republican and a Democrat in the lead. That's because we need to sit down and work with each other.
"The rules of this institution have required that. That's why we exist. Why have a bicameral legislative body? Why have two chambers? What were the Framers thinking about 218 years ago?" According to Dodd, the Constitution's authors "understood that there is a tyranny of the majority."
Strange how now that they are the majority, Democrats no longer see it as tyranny.
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7) Long wait for reform must end
By Anne Warhover
The long wait for health care reform continues.
And in light of the just-released Colorado Health Report Card by the Colorado Health Foundation, the wait here is especially untenable for our children.
As I shared with state legislators earlier this month, the Report Card documents that we are losing ground in the fight to address our children's health, dropping from an already poor C- to a dismal D+. Among the childhood indicators, the most dramatic drop was in the area of childhood obesity, where the state fell from third in the country to 23rd. In addition, the state ranks 45th in the number of children without health insurance, and 34th in the number of children who participate in regular vigorous activity.
These deplorable children's health rankings form half of the "Colorado Paradox," the other half being our well-educated, largely transplanted and comparatively healthy adult population. It is this adult half of the "Colorado Paradox" that leads people to believe Colorado is among the healthiest places in the country. But our children's poor health makes it clear that is not the case.
If we are to help ensure a bright future for our country, a future that our children will shape, with good health as their essential resource, the long wait for substantive health care reform must end.
Consistent with the three priorities laid out by The Colorado Health Foundation — healthy living, health coverage, and health care — I urge reform measures that address the flaws in the insurance marketplace and change the way health care is delivered, while at the same time improving the Colorado Health Report Card indicators specific to children. Only then will Coloradans be assured they can receive the right care at the right time in the right place.
Both the House and Senate health care reform bills include numerous provisions designed to improve how health care is delivered. Unprecedented investments are made in prevention and wellness programs so that people can avoid more serious — and more costly — acute care. These measures also would pilot and, if proven successful, implement new programs to encourage coordination among caregivers so that unnecessary costs (ranging from duplicated tests to avoidable hospital re-admissions) can be reduced.
In addition, and of particular importance to children's health, federal health care reform takes significant steps to address the widespread shortage of primary care providers through medical school education incentives and improved reimbursement for primary care providers, to name but two.
Other programs and payment reforms in these legislative proposals would align the financial incentives of providers with the health interests of their patients. Whereas now our fee-for-service payment system rewards the delivery of more care, the reforms in these bills will reward providers who can improve quality and reduce costs. Some of these programs, including accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes, and value-based purchasing have significant potential to reduce costs and improve quality.
Similarly, proposed health insurance reforms contained in these bills are important and far-reaching. Imperfections aside, they would finally end the regressive practice of rescinding health coverage when it is needed most, denying coverage — even to infants — based on pre-existing conditions, and pricing individuals out of the health care system based on their health needs. Furthermore, both the House and Senate health reform packages include important administrative simplification provisions that would reduce the clerical burden on providers, patients and health plans, and lead to greater accuracy and efficiency in the overall administration of care.
I applaud the health care reform work being performed by members of Congress with the help of experts from across the health care spectrum. I also applaud the efforts of the Ritter administration and members of the Colorado legislature. At the same time, I urge these leaders to continue moving forward and to resist the temptation to "kick the can" of substantive health care reform down the road yet again. For the sake of the health and well-being of this nation, this most important work must continue.
Just as the Colorado Health Foundation remains committed to Colorado becoming the healthiest state in the nation, we call on our elected representatives in Washington and in Colorado to maintain their will to enact substantive health care reform.
Anne Warhover is president and CEO of the Colorado Health Foundation.
7a) Obama's bipartisan past
By: Rep. Peter Roskam
Mr. President: Business in Washington doesn't have to be this way. You need not be pushed to the left and you can work across the aisle like you have in the past.
That is what I told President Obama a few weeks ago at the GOP caucus. He really does have an ability to work in a bipartisan manner. I know because we worked together for years to solve problems in the Illinois Senate.
Today's health care summit doesn't have to be a regurgitation of an unpopular health care bill. Nor does the President have to embrace Congressional Democratic leadership, which has systematically stiff-armed Republicans out of any conversation about solutions. Sure, health care is a contentious issue, but President Obama has successfully worked with Republicans under similar parameters.
When we served together on the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee, we worked collaboratively, crafting and passing sweeping death penalty reform legislation. Obama later called it the signature legislation of his state senate career.
We passed it even though, as he said, it was controversial at the outset. He was right. There may be no issue more highly charged than the death penalty.
But because we avoided partisanship, and negotiated in good faith, meaningful reform passed. That same willingness to reach across the aisle led Illinois to pass ethics reform. It also helped us pass criminal justice reform, permitting criminal appeals to receive certain due rights.
We achieved reform without either of us sacrificing our core principles. Today's health care debate has taken a wholly different tack. Democratic leadership has had zero willingness to negotiate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's definition of bipartisanship seems to mean that Republicans abandon their principles and vote for a damaging bill. That's not how Obama operated before he came to Washington.
The President knows that Democrats and Republicans could work together to pass substantive incremental reforms today. He said, in his address on Sept. 9, that we agree on about 80 percent of what needs to be done. He was right.
Congressional Republicans are prepared to offer the President a range of common-sense solutions that lower premiums and increase access. Just yesterday, the House passed a repeal of the antitrust exemption for health insurance, with broad GOP support.
Next step: empower Americans to buy health insurance across state lines. Develop small business and association health plans. Take care of the issue of preexisting conditions. Let's make meaningful bipartisan reforms to medical liability in this country.
We could unleash innovation to reduce the number of uninsured with State Innovation Programs. Why can't each of these ideas become bills that the Congress could move?
This is what Republicans in Congress will bring to the Blair House Summit: a fresh approach to enacting health care reforms that can gain bipartisan support.
I fear Congressional Democrats will bring their tired approach, pushing a bill that has already met the disapproval of the American public.
I've seen firsthand the way the President was able to work across the aisle on controversial issues. It's time he got back to that pre-Washington approach.
Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) is a member of the Ways & Means Committee and a deputy whip. He was formerly in the Illinois Senate, where he served on the Judiciary Committee with then-state Sen. Barack Obama, 2000-2004.
7b)Spirited debate unfolds at health care summit
President Obama and Republican and Democratic leaders engaged in a spirited but civil debate at a health care summit Thursday, finding agreement on issues such as high costs but not much common ground on how to achieve reform.
In opening remarks, Obama said that "it is absolutely critical to begin now moving on what is one of the biggest drags on the economy."
The situation affects not just people without health insurance but also those who have it, Obama said. "The problem is not getting better. It is getting worse," he said.
Obama called on the lawmakers not to "focus on where we differ but focus on where we agree."
The differences were evident though in what each side believes should happen next.
Share your reaction to the summit
In opening remarks for Republicans, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said his party wants to focus on health care costs. Alexander urged the president and Democrats to scrap current legislation and "start over."
But Democrats said that wouldn't happen, adding Americans cannot wait.
"For them, they don't have time for us to start over," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California.
Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona said there's a major philosophical difference between the two sides over who should be in charge of the health care system -- the government or private industry.
"There's so much in the bills you have supported that puts so much control in Washington," Kyl said to Obama.
House GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia noted that Republicans are nearly unanimous in their opposition to the bills.
"There is a reason we voted no," Cantor said to Obama. "It does have to do with the philosophical differences you pointed out. It also has to do with our fear that Washington can define what are essential health benefits."
Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa made an impassioned plea for passage of health care reform, saying the current system discriminates against people who are already sick.
Racial segregation has been outlawed, he said, "however, we still allow segregation today on the basis of your health."
Watch Harkin's plea for everyone to have insurance
Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia urged greater oversight of the health insurance sector, which he called "a shark that swims just below the water."
"This is a rapacious industry that does what it wants, unknown to the people of America except on an individual basis," Rockefeller said.
Watch as opposing sides protest at health summit
Critics have said the nationally televised six-hour summit at the Blair House will amount to little but a public relations stunt. The summit discussions were to be based on four themes -- controlling costs, enacting insurance reforms, reducing the deficit and expanding coverage.
"This is about theater," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, before the meeting began. "This is not about substance unfortunately."
Obama addressed that concern in his opening remarks. "I hope this isn't political theater where people are playing to the camera," he said.
Obama said Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that costs have to be contained.
"It's absolutely true that if all we're doing is adding more people to a broken system, then costs will continue to skyrocket," he said.
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who's a physician, cited several ways to cut costs, including focusing on disease prevention and management as well as cracking down on fraud.
Coburn also blasted what he called "extortion" behind frivolous lawsuits that he said make doctors victims of the legal system.
"A large number of the tests we order every day are not for the patients, they're for the doctors," Coburn said.
Another Republican physician, Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, said doctors also would like to see a plan that would "simplify, streamline and standardize all paperwork that is involved." The cumbersome paperwork "takes you away from patient care," he said.
The discussion took a testy tone when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona complained about how the Democrats handled the process of approving the legislation.
McCain, who lost to the president in the 2008 race, said candidate Obama had pledged eight times that the health care debate would be conducted in the open and televised by C-SPAN.
Instead, McCain said, the legislation was "produced behind closed doors ... with unsavory deals."
Obama tried to break in, but McCain asked to be allowed to finish.
After McCain was done, Obama seemed to flash some anger when he said, "We're not campaigning. The election is over."
Said McCain with a slight laugh, "I'm reminded of that every day."
At one point, both men tried to talk over each other.
"The focus should not be on the issue of how we get a bill done," Obama said.
McCain replied, "The American people care about what we do and how we do it."
Obama cut off the discussion when he said, "We can have a debate about process or we can have a debate about how we help the American people."
Obama also seemed to take a shot at Cantor, the House Republican whip, who stacked the voluminous House and Senate health care reform bills on the table in front of him.
The president called the display "props." "These are the kinds of political things we do that prevent us from having a conversation," Obama said.
Watch what areas Democrats and Republicans can agree on
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs expressed confidence earlier Thursday that a bill will pass.
"We're very close to health care reform for the American people," Gibbs told CNN's "American Morning."
Three top Democratic sources told CNN the new goal is to pass the final legislation by the end of March or else Congress will have to move back to other issues such as job creation and unfinished spending bills.
Obama made health care reform the domestic priority during his first year in office, but after Democrats lost their crucial 60th vote in the Senate recently, they were forced to rethink their strategy.
Obama on Monday unveiled a blueprint for his compromise health care plan, which closely resembles the bill that emerged from the Senate last year.
The White House said the president's proposal would extend coverage to 31 million Americans. If enacted, Obama's plan would constitute the biggest expansion of federal health care guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid more than four decades ago.
Obama's plan does not include a government-run public health insurance option, which is in the House bill but not in the Senate version. Liberal Democrats support the public option, but Republicans and some moderate Democrats fiercely oppose it.
Pelosi on Wednesday declined to give any specifics about how Democrats will proceed on the health care overhaul. She also sidestepped questions about Democrats' plans to use a controversial parliamentary shortcut to bypass GOP opposition and pass a health care bill.
Watch what's at stake at the health care summit
But Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said Democrats did talk Wednesday morning about using "reconciliation" to move health care legislation. He said Democrats anticipate the issue would come up at Thursday's summit.
Reconciliation is a process, limited to budget-related bills, that bypasses the Senate rule of 60 votes being needed to end debate. By using reconciliation, only a majority vote would be needed to advance a bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, warned the political consequences would be severe if Democrats moved forward without GOP support.
Pointing to the backlash over the special deal in the Senate bill for Nebraska's Democratic senator, Ben Nelson, to cover his state's Medicaid costs, McConnell said, "If they think the American people are mad at them now, they haven't seen anything yet."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, pointed out this week that reconciliation has been used more than 20 times since 1981, by both parties.
In his opening remarks Thursday, Republican spokesman Alexander urged Democrats not to use reconciliation and ram the measure through Congress.
CNN's Dana Bash, Ed Henry, Kristi Keck and Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.
7b)Ram It Through!
By Peter Beinart
The GOP argues it would be undemocratic for Democrats to pass health-care reform using reconciliation. But, Peter Beinart argues, that’s how our republic works.
Democrats are considering using the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform in the Senate, a maneuver that would require only 51 votes. Republicans are outraged. Using reconciliation to pass health care, they insist, would be undemocratic.
It’s an odd argument, when you think about it. Senate Republicans are employing the filibuster more than any Congress in history. (In the 19th Century, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. By the 1960s, filibusters still greeted less than ten percent of legislation. In this Congress, by contrast, Republicans have filibustered 80 percent of major bills). This near-permanent filibuster has created a de facto 60 vote requirement for passing most legislation. And because the GOP filibusterers disproportionately represent small states, that 60-vote requirement actually translates to about 2/3 of the American people. That, according to Republican logic, is democratic. Circumventing a filibuster and thus requiring 51 votes, by contrast, tramples the will of the people.
Our entire political system is premised on the right of Congress to act in defiance of its constituents as long as members are willing to face those constituents at the ballot box.
Republicans buttress their case with polls. The American people, they note, generally tell pollsters that they oppose the Democratic health-care bill. (In fact, surveys suggest that when you actually tell Americans what’s in it, they become more supportive). But let’s take the Republican argument on its face. Americans oppose Obama’s health-care reform and therefore, passing it is undemocratic.
The GOP actually has a point here: There is something undemocratic about passing laws that a majority of Americans oppose. We just don’t happen to live in a democracy; we live in a democratic republic. Instead of putting laws to a popular vote, as they did in ancient Athens, we elect members of Congress, and allow them to vote as they please.
Our entire political system, in fact, is premised on the right of members of Congress to act in defiance of their constituents as long as those members of Congress are willing to face those constituents at the ballot box. That’s what many congressional Republicans did in 2006 when they supported George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq even though most Americans opposed it. Back then, it was called voting your conscience.
All this would be pretty uncontroversial, I suspect, were it not for the media, which has trouble distinguishing between things that are unpopular and things that are wrong. On cable, politicians and pundits are forever declaring that the American people agree with them, as if that ends the argument. And their opponents almost never respond by saying that the view of the American people is irrelevant, because the American people are wrong. By pretending that the public agrees with them on everything, politicians create the impression that there is something illegitimate about holding views that the majority of Americans don’t share. That’s the perception Republicans are exploiting during the health-care fight. It would be nice if someone disabused them of it.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
7c)Why Canadian premier seeks health care in U.S.
By Sally C. Pipes
Danny Williams, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, traveled to the United States earlier this month to undergo heart valve surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. With his trip, Williams joined a long list of Canadians who have decided that they prefer American medicine to their own country's government-run health system when their lives are on the line.
But just as American hospitals are becoming popular vacation destinations for about 40,000 Canadians a year, California's Senate is pressing ahead with its effort to make the state's health care system more like the one in the Great White North. The Senate recently approved a bill sponsored by Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, that would install a government-run, single-payer health system in the Golden State. The Assembly will soon consider the measure.
Lawmakers should take Williams' case to heart. Canada's experience shows that government health care leads to waiting lists, rationing and lower quality of care.
For instance, Canada suffers from a scarcity of physicians. Over the last decade, about 11 percent of doctors trained in Canadian medical schools have come to the United States to practice. Physicians' salaries are set at artificially low levels by provincial authorities: The average Canadian doctor makes just 42 percent of what an American physician does.
Canadian patients also face wait times for medical procedures. Nearly 700,000 Canadians are on a waiting list for surgery or other treatments.
A Canadian patient has to wait roughly four months for the average surgical or other therapeutic treatment. Wait times were similar a decade ago - even though the government has substantially increased health care spending since then.
Canadians also lack access to advanced medical technology. Compared to other developed countries, Canada ranks 14th out of 25 nations surveyed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in access to MRIs; 19th of 26 for CT scanners; and eighth out of 21 for mammograms.
Canadian women are nearly a quarter less likely to have had a mammogram than are American women.
Despite these visible shortcomings, many American lawmakers want to emulate Canada's system. President Obama's new blueprint for reform would greatly expand Medicaid by adding 15 million Americans to the rolls. Medicaid patients already have trouble finding doctors who will treat them because of low government reimbursements. Nearly a third of physicians nationwide won't accept new Medicaid patients, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Expanding the program will only make matters worse.
Congress would also like to beef up government-run "comparative effectiveness research," whereby officials evaluate competing drugs to determine which ones are purportedly most effective for the average patient.
Canada employs these reviews ostensibly to make sure that public money is spent wisely. But such reviews just diminish patients' access to the latest medicines. Publicly insured Canadians have access to half as many drugs as their countrymen with private insurance - and must wait a year longer to gain access to the few new drugs that become available.
America's health care system merits reform - but not of the government-heavy sort favored by the president and congressional Democrats. Expanding government control over the health care system will diminish outcomes for American patients - as well as the occasional Canadian visitor.
Sally C. Pipes, a former Canadian, is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute.
7d)The Fourth Rail
By Ross Kaminsky on 2.25.10 @ 6:07AM
Entitlement programs or, more specifically, reforming them before they bankrupt the nation, is considered the Third Rail of Politics. We now have, however, a Fourth Rail, just as pernicious, doing just as much damage to our national financial well-being and perhaps threatening our liberty even more than Social Security and Medicare. That Fourth Rail is the growth of the public sector work force, i.e. employees of federal, state, and local governments, and the massive money- and power-hungry unions which represent them.
Supporters of unions have long argued, and with good reason, that in the early days of industrializing America, unions helped eliminate child labor and forced companies to create safer working conditions for employees. Do workers at the DMV, IRS, or your town's Public Transit Board (or their children) have substantial risk of working 16 hour days in dark, dangerous environments? It's hard to imagine the founders of the AFL thinking that unions would devolve into organizations whose primary goal is to make it impossible to fire bad workers, to argue for an ever-increasing number of vacation days, and to eliminate secret ballots which are not just a staple of union election history but also a fundamental underpinning of liberty. The purpose of public sector unions is now simple: Maximize the unions' income and political power by working against every possible increase in government efficiency. And they've been wildly successful.
In the last few years, government employment -- and thus the taxes required to fund it -- has been growing while private businesses across the nation have had to cut back to survive. As THIS chart from Americans for Limited Government shows, since December 2007 the private sector has lost over 7 million jobs while government has added about 100,000 jobs.
But even this growth of government employee headcount, which is about 85% at the state and local level, understates the problem. In addition to government hiring more workers, it's also increasing their total compensation at a much faster rate than is found in the private sector. (See chart on page 3 of the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards' analysis of "Public Sector Unions and the Rising Costs of Employee Compensation".)
Until the late 1960s, private sector workers tended to earn slightly more than government workers -- an appropriate situation given the job security that tends to come with a government job. For about the next 15 years, until the early 1980s, public and private sector average compensation was about equal. But beginning in 1982, compensation patterns diverged, with state and local government workers getting much larger raises than private sector workers.
The growth of federal (civilian, not military) compensation is even more pronounced, as another Edwards study shows. In 2000, the average federal civilian worker made two-thirds more than the average private sector worker. By 2008, the federal worker was making double -- yes double -- the private sector worker.
You'll forgive me if I sound like an infomercial salesman here when I say "But wait, there's more!" These figures include what is actually spent on government employee compensation, not what is promised. Government workers' pensions tend to be "defined benefit" rather than the now-typical "defined contribution" plan in the private sector. This means that government will owe retirees fixed payments regardless of the value of the investments or savings in which the government deposited its contributions for those workers' sunset years. Across the country, state and local governments have consistently underfunded pensions and future health insurance liabilities, even before the stock market sell-off of 2008.
According to a new study by the Pew Center on the States, "A $1 trillion gap… exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them."
So, the growth of government head-count and compensation is not only costing taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars a year now, but it's also burdening our children with massive future liabilities.
But it's not just in terms of finances that this growth of the public sector is hurting America. The unions which represent government workers, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), are accumulating power, money, and influence, especially over Democrats, and using these as a self-reinforcing mechanism to acquire more.
The unions pushed (and fortunately failed, albeit just barely) for the Senate approval of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker, an associate general counsel to the SEIU, is a radical pro-labor activist attorney who believes, among other things, that "employers should have no right to be heard in either a representation case or an unfair labor practices case." Although Mr. Becker's approval was successfully filibustered in the Senate, it remains an open question whether President Obama will give Becker a "recess appointment" that would allow Becker to hold the NLRB job for nearly two years over the Senate's prior objection.
The AFGE is filing a petition to be named "the exclusive union representative for 40,000 Transportation Security Officers." Barack Obama's most recent nominee to head the TSA, Errol Southers, who had to withdraw his nomination after having been found lying to Congress, was being blocked by Senator Jim DeMint because Southers refused to disavow wanting to unionize the TSA. The last thing our nation needs is the stultifying influence of unions on airport security. If there's one area where we must not allow unions to prevent the firing of incompetent workers, it's where the safety of our citizens is so clearly at stake. And yet, given the symbiosis between unions and the Obama administration, this outcome remains all too likely.
Last month, the Labor Department reported union membership numbers showing that for the first time in American history, there were more public sector union members than private sector union members: "More public sector employees (7.9 million) belonged to a union than did private sector employees (7.4 million), despite there being 5 times more wage and salary workers in the private sector." And what's the impact of this trend?
In 2008, unions contributed $74.5 million to political candidates, of which $68.2 million went to Democrats. Since 1990, unions have contributed over $630 million to Democrats (more than 12 times their contributions to Republicans.) But even that understates the magnitude of the union-Democrat symbiosis since it doesn't consider independent expenditures such as campaign advertising not coordinated with candidates, as well as get-out-the-vote efforts.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, "In the 2008 election cycle, labor unions reported spending nearly $80 million on independent broadcast advertising, mail and internal advocacy to help elect or defeat federal candidates." In other words, money spent by unions to help Democrats is even greater than the money donated by unions directly to Democrats. As Michael Barone puts it, "Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party."
If there is any good news to be found, it's that the public is rapidly moving away from support of unions. A survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press describes "Favorability Ratings of Labor Unions Fall(ing) Sharply." For the first time since 1985, Americans' unfavorable opinion of unions, at 42%, is higher than the favorable rating, at 41%. Also, the 41% favorable rating is by far the lowest level of public approval of unions in the 25 years of Pew's surveys. The trend toward union disapproval is consistent among men and women, blacks and whites, and is clear across Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Currently only Democrats now show more favorable than unfavorable views of unions but by a much narrower margin than three years ago.
It remains the standard tactic of liberals, government workers, and other leeches off your earnings to demonize anyone who wants to reduce the cost and intrusiveness of government by saying that teachers and policemen will lose their jobs. A few responses are in order: First, both education and law enforcement organizations could reduce bureaucratic bloat if they were forced to cut their budgets. Second, why should it be unacceptable for a teacher or cop to lose his or her job? There is no evidence that hiring more teachers has improved educational outcomes. Indeed some of the most expensive school systems in the nation (on a per-student basis), such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., produce spectacularly bad academic results. Similarly, it can't be that each additional policeman adds proportionately to our safety…but they add disproportionately to our costs. When times are this tough, America can't afford to have sacred cows.
The growth of the number of government workers and the cost of each worker threatens not just Americans' economic future but also our liberty. It is time for citizens to force government at all levels to live within our means. The good news is that much of the problem is at the state and local level, where small numbers of citizens can have bigger impact than on the federal level. Cutting back the metastasizing public sector is the Fourth Rail of politics. It is time for a few well-grounded politicians and citizens to step on that rail before we turn into France -- or even worse, into Greece.
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