The Little Tent

Most of my liberal friends agree that if unemployment remains at 10% or higher, banksters continue to get bailouts and high bonuses, and the health care reform bill as currently written get passed, the Democrats will lose plenty of seats in the November, 2010 elections. This will happen not because moderates and independents will flock to the GOP but because the liberal base will not only not underwrite the campaigns financially and volunteer in mass numbers, they won't even vote. The few liberals who disagree with this assessment, well, they're still naive suckers.

Still, the GOP is doing its part to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so I guess there is some hope. Here's some background. After being rightfully humiliated by the loss of a decades-long reliably Republican congressional seat in New York, a group of Republicans on the RNC have come up with a "purity test" which candidates would have to pass in order to get campaign fund from the national party. The proposed test will be submitted for approval at an upcoming meeting of the national party officials in that exotic state, Hawaii.

I went to Hot Air, a conservative blog distinguished by the fact that it's not all that crazy to see what the test looks like. Here it is in bullet point fashion:

You need to say yes to eight if you want to get paid, per Reagan’s saying that anyone who agrees with him 80 percent of the time is his friend, not his opponent:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;
(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing, denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Well, the list certainly doesn't contain any surprises, and parts of it are actually a little soft, given the current rhetoric being used by La Palin and suchlike. But it still is the kind of purity test which could give a few well-entrenched Republicans some trouble.

Even conservatives are a little uneasy with the test. Kathleen Parker sure is.

Just when independents and moderates were considering revisiting the GOP tent.

Just when a near-perfect storm of unpopular Democratic ideas -- from massive health-care reform to terrorist show trials, not to mention global-warming hype -- is coagulating over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Just when the GOP was gaining traction after gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey . . . Republicans perform a rain dance at their own garden party.

Things were just going too well. ...

The so-called purity test is a 10-point checklist -- a suicide pact, really -- of alleged Republican positions. Anyone hoping to play on Team GOP would have to sign off on eight of the 10 -- through their voting records, public statements or a questionnaire. The test will be put up for consideration before the Republican National Committee when it meets early next year in Hawaii. ...

James Bopp Jr., chief sponsor of the resolution and a committee member from Indiana, has said that "the problem is that many conservatives have lost trust in the conservative credentials of the Republican Party."

Actually, no, the problem is that many conservatives have lost faith in the ability of Republican leaders to think. The resolutions aren't so much statements of principle as dogmatic responses to complex issues that may, occasionally, require more than a Sharpie check in a little square. [Emphasis added]

Oh, my! That's got to leave a mark.

So, if the Democrats somehow manage to squeak by in 2010, it won't be because of the sterling job the 111th Congress has done. It will be because the GOP took a page out of Newt Gingrich's play book, crumpled it up, and then re-jiggered it in Mad Hatter style. But that's what happens without reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. Stupid people shoot themselves in the foot.

Sunday Funnies

(Cartoon by Lee Judge / The Kansas City Star (November 27, 2009) and featured at McClatchy DC. Click on the image to enlarge.)

Bonus Critter Blogging: Sea Cucumber

(Photograph courtesy of Census of Marine Life and published at National Geographic. Click on the link for more information on this fascinating critter and others seen over a mile deep into the ocean.)

All For A Lie

It was an interesting visit to Watching America today. There were a few articles on American health care reform, a few on Afghanistan, a few more on Israel's discomfort with the Obama administration, in some cases castigated as "the worst ever," and a few analyses of the Obama visit to China.

The one that caught my eye, however, was an editorial in the United Arab Emirate's Khaleej Times. Ostensibly about the British inquiry into the Iraq War and how it all came about, the editorial also raises some serious and fair questions about the US and its complete refusal to look into the war.

Britain, the second leading member of the Coalition of the Willing headed by the United States, has ordered an inquiry into the Iraq war.

The committee headed by Sir John Chilcot, a retired civil servant, has promised to produce a “full and insightful” account of the most debated and contested war in recent history and the circumstances in which it was inflicted on Iraq. ...

So unless this probe results in concrete steps, leading to justice for the people of Iraq and preventing more unjust wars in the future, this is little more than a symbolic exercise.

But by initiating this Britain is at least trying to repent and make amends for the criminal blunders of its leaders. What about the United States? Why’s there been no action, no step whatsoever in this direction?

No attempts, however perfunctory, have been made by the US establishment, civil society and the media to confront their leaders on Iraq.

Yet more than a million innocent lives have been wasted in Iraq, not to mention the appalling, total devastation the war has unleashed on the country that was one of the region’s most modern nations. And all for a lie! [Emphasis added]

Why indeed.

We do know plenty about the steps taken to drag us into a war that had no reason to happen. During his first campaign, George W. Bush told his would-be biographer that he wanted to be a war-time president. Then, after the 9/11 attacks, White House officials, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, pounded on intelligence officials to find an Iraq link, even though all evidence pointed to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

By 1992, the propaganda was being catapulted furiously about Iraq, how it was a safe haven for Al Qaeda, how it was developing and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, on its neighbors and on the US. Even though each bit of evidence put forward was trashed by our allies as gross misinterpretations at best and as outright fabrications at worst, the drum beats increased. We know that from the Downing Street Memos. Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations with sketches and equivocal photographs to try to convince the world that unspeakable evil would be unleashed by Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, unless the US was allowed to invade.

And invade we did, even though there never was any plausible reason for doing so, and the reasons offered were changed as they were shown to be laughable. No WMDs were found, so then it became a matter of regime change because Saddam Hussein was such a monster. Once he was removed, it became a matter of protecting Iraq's oil fields for the people of Iraq.

While we were engaged in that war, our intelligence services and our military engaged in what can only be called war crimes by civilized people. Back home, our civil liberties were shredded as warrantless wire taps issued and private emails were intercepted. The US Constitution became "just a piece of paper."

Yet the new administration has made it clear that it didn't want any investigation into this illegal and immoral war because the new president wanted the country to look forward, not backward. It was only by exerting pressure on the new government that Attorney General Eric Holder finally agreed to investigate some of the torture issues, but after that announcement, nothing further has been said about it.

If our closest ally can make even a perfunctory gesture towards looking into a war which is still going on, why can't we? Are we really that omnipotent that we can break international law with impunity. Are we so pure that our motives can never be examined, even though hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of our actions?

American exemptionalism at its best.

And how shameful it is.

Suffer, Little Children

It's hard to start the day after reading an article such as this one from the Washington Post. It concerns the treatment of two young men (children, really, at age 17 and 16) by Americans at the Bagram prison.

The two teenagers -- Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 -- said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

The holding center described by the teenagers appeared to have been a facility run by U.S. Special Operations forces that is separate from the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main American-run prison, which holds about 700 detainees. The teenagers' descriptions of a holding area on a different part of the Bagram base are consistent with the accounts of two other former detainees, who say they endured similar mistreatment, but not beatings, while being held last year at what Afghans call Bagram's "black" prison.

The boys, in addition to being punched by their captors, were also given a healthy dose of sleep deprivation along with some psycho-sexual humiliation when they were forced to strip naked for a "medical exam" performed in front of a dozen or so American soldiers who mocked and laughed at them. Any teenage boy would be scarred by such treatment, but in a culture which holds nakedness in front of others as deeply shameful, the actions of their captors must have been devastating.

Defense officials' only response was that there is no inhumane treatment going on at Bagram. At this point in history, I am inclined to call bullshit on any such assertion. Too much has happened the last nine years.

Here's the disturbing part, however. Because the "black" prison is not run by the US Army, but rather by the "U.S. Special Operations forces," that activity can and probably does continue.

There have been reports about the existence of an interrogation facility at Bagram that is run by Special Operations forces, but little has been disclosed about living conditions or interrogation methods there. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have not been permitted access to the detainees at this facility. The site has continued to operate under the terms of an executive order that Obama signed soon after taking office, which forced the closure of secret prisons run by the CIA but not those run by Special Operations forces. [Emphasis added]

And so teenagers and tribal elders in Afghanistan, perhaps even women (Aafia Siddiqui, for example), are still at risk of inhumane treatment which is forbidden by international law.

Not much change there, eh?

Monsters.

Friday Cat Blogging

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Change I Can Believe In

All my kvetching and caviling aside, I happily admit to being delighted with some of the changes President Obama has instituted. The one that put some crunch in my cereal this morning was announced in today's Washington Post. K Street isn't as happy as I am, but that makes the day even brighter:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don't have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

Now, I'm a little stunned that there are so many advisory committees and that the exact number isn't known, but I can kind of understand the usefulness of having some groups available to the government with expertise on the issues. I cannot, however, fathom why agencies and the White House would be happy with lobbyists in that role. Rather than having a PHARMA lobbyist providing input to the FDA, a researcher who understands the concept of side effects and the studies which track them just seems to be a better candidate, even if that researcher works for Merck.

Lobbyists, many of whom are screaming about President Obama's move, may understand the economics of any agency's decision, but they all have an agenda. That's their job. They are lobbyists for a particular point of view, a particular business enterprise. They are not interested in such notions as the public good, only in the bottom line of their clients.

At least one good government organization gets it:

"You may lose a lot of expertise, but these people are also paid to have a point of view; they have an agenda," said Mary Boyle, a vice president at Common Cause. "We support what the administration is doing to get deep-seated special interests out of the business of running our government, so this seems like a step in the right direction."

It's a start, but an important one.

Nicely done, Mr. President

Squanto Should Have Thought Twice

Happy Thanksgiving, good people. May your tables groan with plenty and may your families stay away from forbidden topics.

Thanksgiving is an odd holiday, but in many respects it is a truly American holiday. Yes, it represents the celebration of a nation at its very earliest, but it also signifies what is best and what is worst about this nation. Many of us will sit down to a huge meal and be thankful that we can do so. Too many people, however, will not have that blessing, not this year, and probably not next year. The irony is that many of those people who will not be eating themselves into a tryptophan coma had ancestors at that first dinner.

Merlene Davis of the Lexington Herald-Leader offered an incredible (and appalling) reflection on the status of Native Americans in a column featured by McClatchy DC. Here are some of the statistics she cites:

According to official population figures, there are fewer than 5 million Indians in the U.S., and they have a life expectancy nearly five years shorter than other Americans. They die from pneumonia, influenza, diabetes, tuberculosis and alcoholism at a far higher rate than the rest of the country.

High school and college dropout rates for Native Americans are higher than for any other group in the U.S. And the suicide rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives is about 70 percent higher than for Americans in general. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for American Indians age 15 to 24 years of age and two thirds of those suicides in that age range are males.

Why aren't we doing anything about that?

She also notes that one in three Native American women are raped in their lifetime.

These are all statistics that President Obama is aware of, and he cited them at a meeting he held with representatives from the federally recognized tribes on November 5, 2009. Ms. Davis noted at the start of her column that not too many people were aware of that meeting. It was one of those meetings between heads of governments (yes, each tribe is a sovereign nation) that just didn't make the evening news in most places.

It should have. It was one of those times that President Obama kept one of his campaign promises by doing something positive.

The reservations, run by autonomous governments, need better educational facilities, better access to health care, and better public safety.

To get the ball rolling, Obama signed an executive order giving all federal agencies three months to submit proposals that would lead to "regular and meaningful consultation and collaboration" with Native Americans when decisions are being made that affect them.

The time frame included in that executive order is significant. President Clinton issued a similar order without one, and nothing ever came of it. Mr. Obama is not taking any chances on this one, as well he shouldn't. Ms. Davis explains the obvious, although apparently not too many people see it as obvious:

We demand quick reactions from the government when utilities are disabled because of storms or hurricanes. Some of these folks have been without electricity for years, if they ever had it.

We demand police protection when one person is threatened, raped or murdered in our cities. Can you imagine what we'd do if 33 percent of our women were raped?

Now the "First Americans," as President Obama called them (although I much prefer the less Eurocentric Canadian term "First Nations") have gotten some badly needed attention, and it appears that it is attention that is respectful. That is a good start. If President Obama continues in this vein, and meaningful change is carried out, then he will have done a good thing, as good a thing as bringing peace in the Middle East, in my opinion.

May it be so.

They Knew

A doctor friend of mine asked why I had such a bug up my ass when it came to pharmaceutical companies. After all, I'm benefiting from a clinical study which provides me with free drugs to control my cardiac arrhythmia. Surely I can't be so ungrateful as to ignore that. I told her that I could cheerfully be so ungrateful, because after years of following the pharmaceuticals I could honestly say that their good works (research and development of life saving drugs, as in my case, at least I think so) are roundly offset by their greed when it comes to marketing. Recent history has shown that patients' well-being are happily sacrificed to sales, cheerfully and knowingly.

She scoffed, but in yesterday's Los Angeles Times I got the perfect rebuttal to her smugness. The Vioxx scandal got revisited.

Thirty studies involving more than 20,000 people demonstrated an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes linked to the drug Vioxx, which was taken off the market in 2004 after generating billions of dollars annually in sales. However, this information was not easily accessible to the public, and the Food and Drug Administration's reservations about the drug were lost in a blizzard of direct-to-consumer marketing, according to a study and commentary published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The analysis showed that safety concerns about Vioxx, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory manufactured by Merck & Co., arose at least four years before the drug was withdrawn. Under new FDA rules, however, manufacturers are now required to disclose the results of post-market safety studies. ...

The issue is crystallized further in a commentary by Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz and colleagues of the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group. They point out that the FDA, as the repository of post-marketing surveillance studies, is a weak opponent to the media-savvy and heavily funded pharmaceutical industry.

"The Vioxx story really highlights the difference between marketing and informing," Schwartz wrote in the commentary. "If physicians and patients had had the facts, it would have taken an alchemist, not a marketing department, to turn this lemon into gold." [Emphasis added]

Four years. And in those four years people died of heart attacks and strokes because their doctors were not aware of the risks. Studies which would have informed patients and, probably more importantly, their physicians were hidden for four years.

I don't know which is worse: that pharmaceutical companies can hide this information or that the government helps them do so, if only by negligence or by the lack of eyes focused on the task. Theoretically at least, the new and improved FDA is halting this kind of practice. Post approval tests are supposed to be reported to the FDA and the FDA must make those reports available to the public. That, at least, is a start.

But it must be cold comfort to those who lost loved ones the last time around. It probably doesn't help that the company involved argues that these test results are questionable. It should also be cold comfort to the rest of use who know that these ghouls own a huge chunk of the table labeled "Health Care Reform."

Finally!

There is something exceptionally sweet in finding someone who not only analyzes an issue the same way as I do, but who presents that analysis in far better prose than I am capable of. I came across that kind of serendipitous moment in this column by Issac Bailey of The Myrtle Beach Sun and featured by McClatchy DC. His subject is the decision by the Department of Justice to try the alleged conspirators in 9/11 in New York City in the environs of the Twin Towers and the hysterical response to the announcement of that decision.

His lede grabbed me by the heart:

I didn't know we had so many scared conservative leaders.

There are a fair number of scared liberal ones as well, given the rhetoric from Washington, Columbia and New York.

But I thought conservative leaders and pundits were the "Bring it on!" types who crave confrontations with terrorists.

Heh.

That craving is usually satisfied vicariously by sending young Americans to war, usually with inadequate support, equipment and protection, but I digress. Mr. Bailey then takes aim at one of the reliably conservative huffer-and-puffers, Cal Thomas:

But Cal Thomas, one of the country's most widely read columnists, took the cake with this assessment:

"The administration's first mistake is to label these men 'criminals,' as if a terrorist attack and the announced objective of forcibly 'Islamisizing' America were the same as robbing a bank," he wrote. "The 9-11 attacks were an act of war, as much as if a nation-state had attacked us. Trials should not be held for war criminals until the war has been won."

First notice the inconsistency, which is abundant in this debate. Thomas chastises the administration for calling terrorists "criminals" then goes onto to label them "war criminals." Call them terrorists or murderers or kidnappers or hijackers or kamikaze, radical Islamists. I don't care. Just bring them to justice and prevent other planned attacks.

Thomas also makes a sleight-of-hand argument about how there should be no trials "until the war has been won." Others like him say we are in a war and therefore must temporarily put aside our ideals. Never mind that standing on principles in the toughest moments is the ultimate show of strength. Those same critics even complain that more people aren't calling our efforts "The War on Terror."

We are in the midst of a war that won't ever end because no president will dare declare mission accomplished against radical Islamic terrorism. And yet we are told parts of the Constitution should not apply until the war is won.

Why not just throw the whole thing out. That'll prove how tough we are.

And that's what it's all about, really. Either we believe that our Constitution is one of the most sublime gifts ever offered to humankind because of its stern insistence on due process, on the rule of law, and on the limitation of government in matters of civil liberties, or we don't. And if we don't, we stand right next to the governments we excoriate daily in the newspapers: China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea.

If our Constitution only applies when the sun is shining and Wall Street posts another high, then we are not only not exceptional, we are sadly run-of-the-mill cowards.

I was brought up differently.

Dissed Again

Doyle McManus is one of those Los Angeles Times columnists who makes me crazy. I usually don't like what he has to say, but I almost always have to agree that he's right. His latest opinion piece is a perfect example of the discomfort he causes in me.

The great healthcare debate hasn't been a triumph of mass politics on either side. Congress isn't being stampeded by the public into passing a bill -- and it's not being stopped by the public from passing one, either.

Instead, the debate has turned out to be a battle of old-fashioned special interests and parochialism. The most important players have been the insurance industry, the American Medical Assn., labor unions and the AARP, the senior citizens lobby. As for parochialism, last week's most blatant action may have been Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's insertion into the bill of a $100-million Medicaid bonus for Louisiana, whose senior senator, Mary Landrieu, has been one of the holdouts.

One reason for this resurgence of backroom politics is simple: Polls show the public to be fairly evenly divided on healthcare reform and understandably confused by its details. But there's also a deeper reason. In modern American politics, with its professional lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign advertising, public opinion isn't always the most important thing. ...

For members of Congress who anticipate tough reelection campaigns, what's most important is not what voters think of healthcare proposals today, but which interest groups will spend money in their states to shape voters' perceptions next year. Groups on both sides, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the unions, have already announced millions of dollars in planned advertising spending to do just that. [Emphasis added]

Now, I'm not certain that Mr. McManus is correct about the polls showing that people are evenly split on healthcare reform. They might be split at this point on the watered down, weak-for-consumers, great-for-insurers bills which are currently being offered, but I suspect that more than half of the American public desperately want health care to be less expensive and more accessible than it is right now. In other words, Americans want some of that change President Obama promised during his campaign for the White House.

That's not what we are going to get. The promises of a grass-roots level campaign for important issues were just that, promises. We should have expected that once President Obama turned over his email lists to the national party. We also should have expected that after the president invited the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical equipment providers to the White House for their input at the very start of the process. They got the first and largest bite.

Lawrence R. Jacobs of the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs has an assessment that pretty well sums up the process:

"This is not being fought by the White House as a grass-roots campaign," Jacobs noted. "Civic engagement at the community level has largely been bypassed. . . . The Obama strategy has been to neutralize the stakeholders so they don't block a bill -- so they don't pull a Harry & Louise," a reference to the insurance industry advertising campaign that helped sink then-President Clinton's healthcare reform proposal in 1994.

In other words, it's politics as usual from the White House and the 111th Congress. The sad part is that we let them get away with it.