(If you had any doubt about the Bush adminstration's attitude towards average Americans, wonder no further. Here's another gambit by the WH crowd to save budget money for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations at our expense. Cross-posted at MyDD.com. - promoted by Jay Stevens)
While most of us are focused on insurance and universal care, the Bush Administration has been incrementally shredding our existing public health safety net in ways that have yet to become apparent. The most recent assault on our public health care infrastructure is escaping the notice of mainstream media and citizen journalists alike, probably because it is not easily explained. I am referring to a proposed set of arcane regulation changes by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) which, if enacted, will result in $15 billion dollars in cuts over five years to service providers, potentially leaving huge geographic gaps in trauma coverage for Montana.
Senator Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is in a position to do something about it
The Washington Post has an op-ed today providing some more on-the-ground insight into how to deal with Iraq. A dozen Captains provide their perspective as mid-level officers:
There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.
America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.
What'll it be?
This is well worth keeping in mind -- ballots are being mailed out today in Missoula giving locals a chance to vote on this very question. I think ballots with a similar question are going out in Helena.
A fairly smart politico emailed me this morning observing that a lot of the state papers are playing up the Bush veto of SCHIP as a partisan thing and down-playing the voice of non-partisan sources, including service providers, who have come out strongly against the President's action.
Also interesting in that discussion is just the polling data. Nationally, something like 77% oppose the veto, even when told it was done to constrain spending. People just aren't buying that line.
Equally important is the sense here on the ground where, in my experience, this issue has massive cross-over appeal. Calling into legislative districts on the issue and talking to voters of every political persuasion, support for CHIP ranged from 60% to 95%, with much of that fluctuation likely due to caller quality.
That's not to say that spending concerns weren't raised, just that it's a marginal position, held, it seems, by the Bush Administration and roughly 22% of the population locally and nationally (but, somehow, nearly 100% of Republican Presidential candidates and a majority of Republican members of Congress).
And this, of course, is another question -- how will Dennis Rehberg, who has said he supports the veto override, deal with a candidate at the top of the ticket when that candidate has pledged to stymie any serious attempt to reform our health care system.
In other words, stop spinning us a story, Mr. President.
Kudos to Max Baucus and Jon Tester for being leaders on this. A mild tip of the hat to Congressman Rehberg for coming around from calling the plan extremist to supporting it after public pressure. Now let's see if he can move his caucus.
The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan group of number crunchers, says Bush's new plans to have a long-term Korea-style presence in Iraq would cost over $2 trillion. That's apparently using conservative estimates.
Damn. That's a lot of money.
But it's probably a significant understatement, because it is just evaluating the budgetary impact of the war itself -- not any of the costs associated with that presence.
In early 2006, a top budget expert and one of the world's leading economists released a report evaluating the cost of the war in terms of real long-term impacts -- economic impacts, cost of debt associated with the war, health and disability responsibilities resulting from Iraq, etc. -- and at that point, they concluded that $2 trillion was a likely real figure for the cost of the war. When they made that argument, the war's cost had been $251 billion, so they said the real cost was 8 times what the budgetary cost was.
Realistically, I'm thinking this whole enterprise will cost us a lot more than $2 trillion. And if we stay in Iraq for two generations, that number will skyrocket.
Update -- This explains why the cornerstone of Mike Lange's fiscal proposals is to end the ongoing engagement in Iraq. There's really no other way to cut spending significantly right now.
I'm writing out of Washington State, let me just say a little bit about Bush's big Iraqi misadventure in the great state of Montana, and dedicate it to the memory of Sgt. Yance Gray.
While the whole game keeps playing in Washington, D.C., with General Petraeus providing unverifiable numbers to claim military progress, a whole host of verifiable claims regarding the relative lack of military progress, something has been forgotten:
We're not making political progress.
Earlier this summer, I was talking with a Republican friend of mine who was still committed to the war. It was nice to have a chance to chat with someone smart, intellectually honest and in total opposition. During that conversation, he talked about the difficulty in this war was the same as in Vietnam -- we were fighting with one arm behind our back.
There's a reason for that. We've already had the military victory. We conquered Iraq. Saddam Hussein has been ousted, caught, tried, sentenced, and executed for his crimes.
At this point, we need a political victory. But we can't marshal that ourselves. The Iraqis need to figure this out -- and they don't appear particularly likely to. No matter how long we stay.
So any concern about chaos erupting in the Middle East is not a question of whether we stay 6 more months, 6 more years, or 60 more years. When we leave, the situation will get worse and then get better. The upshot is that the sooner we leave, the sooner we stop wasting American lives and money and the faster we put whatever process we can in place to deal with a post-American world.
Matthew Yglesias makes another good one: Nearly 60% of Iraqis think killing American troops is "justified."
It seems to me that even 10-25 percent of the population actively approving of attacks on American troops might make our mission there impossible. But when an actual majority support killing our soldiers, then how, exactly, are the soldiers supposed to help Iraq's population? It just doesn't make sense, on any level, to think that a giant military deployment can play a constructive role under these circumstances.
In fact, it just may seem that if a majority support attacks on Americans, our continued presence may be inflaming the fighting over there, serving as a method of recruiting and training young terrorists who would otherwise want nothing to do with blowing up their own country.
Just a thought. By the way, Nir Rosen laid out this argument two years ago in The Atlantic, the sanest bastion of establishment thought throughout this entire fiasco.
I've got to be honest. For a long time, I've been one of those nay-sayers on impeachment -- it's too time-consuming, do we really want Cheney, we don't have the votes to convict, yada yada yada.
But increasingly, I'm very amazed by how outside the realm of possibility the issue is treated.
I mean, let's just ignore illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, Gitmo, torture, stonewalling of Congress, executive 4th branch privilege, and everything else.
In his commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, the White House lied (again -- really, this is about as surprising as a newborn pooping himself). From Patrick Fitzgerald's statement:
- We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
- We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
In other words, Mr. President is full of crap. But that's not news. What is news is that this President thinks anyone deserves to have a sentence reconsidered.
I don?t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.
[W]hether Scooter Libby's original sentence was exactly correct is an interesting question I can't answer; while I have a rough sense it was in the right ballpark, I didn't follow the case closely enough to have any particular views of that.
Nonetheless, I find Bush's action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don't know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby's treatment was very special indeed.
Shocking. Utterly shocking.
As Marcy Wheeler, who has tirelessly followed this entire scandal and is one of the nation's leading experts on Plamegate, notes -- there's a good reason for a commutation, rather than a pardon. Good reason -- at least if you're the President. A pardon would wipe away Scooter's 5th Amendment protections against implicating himself -- which would make him a target for Congressional inquiries into what really happened. With a commutation, but not official declaration of the purging of his record, Scooter still has his 5th Amendment protection. In other words, he can't squeal on the President or the Vice President -- two men clearly knee deep in the decision to out a clandestine CIA officer.
Kagro X, who has advocated vocally for impeachment for a while, found this damning exchange from the Constitutional Conference:
n the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:
"[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty..."
So the question is simply this, Congressional Democrats, pundits, and national media -- the President has made it abundantly clear that he does not care whatsoever for the rule of law. At what point do any of you start expressing concern over maintaining the most basic fabric underlying America's existence as a free republic?
Granted -- more investigations might reveal that the smoke isn't coming from fire. But investigations are clearly warranted.
(Update: Pete Talbot has a quite good summary of the evening's events over a 4&20 Blackbirds.)
I was at the city council meeting last night where the council voted 7-6 to give Missoulians the opportunity to vote on the continued occupation of Iraq this fall.
The meeting was contentious, but I wouldn't actually say it was divisive. If anything, I came away with more respect for folks like Jerry Ballas and Don Nicholson -- as well as some of the audience members on the opposite side of the issue.
Still, there are a few arguments that I wanted to revisit -- especially since the entire purpose of getting this on the ballot was to stoke a discussion and debate about what is happening in Iraq and what course should be taken.
The Center for American Progress has issued a new report "Strategic Reset" calling for the beginning of a phased complete withdrawal from Iraq, acknowledging that our present course is producing more problems than solutions:
First, the United States is arming up different sides in multiple civil wars that could turn even more vicious in the coming years. Second (and more important to America?s strategic interests) billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance is going to some of the closest allies of America?s greatest rival in the Middle East ? Iran. The Shi?a-dominated Iraqi national army and security forces could quite quickly turn their weapons against American troops and allies in the region. [?]
Training and skill-building are not crucial for Iraq?s security forces. In fact many of them have more training than hundreds of U.S. soldiers being deployed as part of this surge. Rather, the Iraqi forces? problems are related to motivation and allegiance. In the past three years, the size of Iraq?s security forces and the levels of violence have both grown steadily, even as the U.S. troop presence remained constant.
With the Missoula City Council poised to vote on whether we can make our voices heard on Iraq this fall, this new report is extremely worthwhile for Missoulians to check out.
After the speech, Sen. Corey Stapleton indicated that both Democrats and Republicans could support Multiple Choice Mitt Romney. That's probably because he has such diverse views. For example, he's pro-choice, pro-life, and strongly pro-choice. He's pro-gay rights and anti-gay rights. He's for campaign finance reform and against campaign finance reform. He votes for Democrats because he supports them. He votes for (the same) Democrats only to help the Republicans.
No doubt, Mitt Romney has some strengths. Namely, he's rich as hell and looks good in a suit. But when it comes to issues, he's invented quantum politics. His views are not fixed. They're probabilistic and those probabilities change radically over time, depending on his personal situation and electorate.
A new Washington Post poll finds the public increasingly fed up with the Democrats on the issue of Iraq. The biggest drops in Democratic Congressional approval rating came from liberal Dems and anti-war independents.
Granted, the poll shows Americans conflicted about the right course. But there's near agreement on one point: the current one ain't it.
Jonathan Alter pens an interesting piece for Newsweek, in which he confronts Bush's desire to make U.S. occupation in Iraq permanent:
So why the move to permanent bases in Iraq? For years, I have been reluctant to embrace the oil theory of American policymaking in the Middle East. I've subscribed to the notion that oil is only part of a complex set of strategic, political and moral issues animating American interests....
But what does that aim have to do with permanent bases? The only two reasons to station troops in the Middle East for half a century are protecting oil supplies (reflecting a pessimistic view of energy independence) outside the normal channels of trade and diplomacy, and projecting raw military power. These are the imperial aims of an empire. During the cold war, charges of U.S. imperialism in Korea and Vietnam were false. Those wars were about superpower struggles. This time, the "I word" is not a left-wing epithet but a straightforward description of policy aims-yet another difference from those two older wars in Asia.
I've got to admit, I'm pretty angry with the Democrats in Congress right now. It'd be nice to have a political party on the left that was willing to stand and fight occasionally. Instead, it's mostly Vichy rhetoric about victory in capitulation.
It's time to bring this war to an end. I think people in D.C. know that even if they're too scared to actually do it. What does that mean for us? It means simply redoubling our efforts, stepping up pressure, and keeping these folks accountable.
In the gratuitously partisan yet fair category, notch this one up. Condoleeza Rice was on the board of Chevron, specifically chairing the committee responsible for overseeing issues that could have political fallout, during a time that the corporation was knowingly or recklessly paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein through the oil-for-food program.
