Tag Archives: Obama

I’ve taken it down

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I’ve removed the “I stand with Obama” about health care link I had posted here. Apparently both the end of life provisions and the public option have been abandoned by the administration.

Mike Allen at Politico suggests that the public option was always a mere bargaining chip and quotes Marc Armbinder of The Atlantic about angry liberals, of whom I guess I am one.

If you equate health care reform with a public option, then, well, health care reform is dead to you. There are a lot of angry liberals tonight. They are within their rights to feel aggrieved.

Whatever may be the future of the health care debate, so called. the move to reform our health care system has now been so demagogued by the wingnuts (who can now include Charles Grassley among their numbers) and so mired in payoffs to the medical-industrial complex, that the entire mix has become toxic.

And the President, instead of leading, instead of providing clarity, caves.

It’s a great disappointment, but no less I suppose than my disappointment with the President’s validation of Bush policies on detention and the rule of law, with his willingness to force major auto manufacturers and their subsidiaries with their hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees into bankruptcy whilst propping up major banks with billions in undeserved federal dollars and rewarding venal bank executives with huge bonuses as recompense for their venality, with his adoption of the factory model of education, emphasizing test scores and rote learning at the expense of independent thinking.

I have a deal of thoughts about all this, but tonight I’m just angry. So I’ve removed the link.

I stand with Obama

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Like many liberals who think a single payer health care system is the only thing that is fair to the public and will work over time, I support Preident Obama’s health care plan as the most practical reform that seems politically possible.

If you’d like to declare your support as well, you can do so by clicking on the little button just below my picture. It will take you to a website that offers a good many ways to help with the health-care initiative.

snakes alive

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Banks win again: The banks have beaten us all in the senate yet another time, having succeeded in gutting legislation to ease bankruptcy of its central measure that would have allowed judges to lower the amounts owed on home mortgages. It would appear that the administration, in failing to push for the provision, has concluded that its economic strategy is succeeding on a macro level and is willing to sacrifice the interest of individual homeowners in order to keep the bankers, and their lobbyists, happy. Yesterday’s New York Times had the story.

Grieving for Dr. Tiller: Not all Christians and Christian groups are opposed to abortion — not all even to late term abortion. Last Monday my church hosted a local memorial for Dr. George Tiller sponsored by Faith Aloud. Well over 200 attended, and we learned later that many more did not attend because they were fearful about security. The Rev. Rebecca Turner, Faith Aloud Executive Director, remarked truly, I thought, that the presentation of Randall Terry’s statement by CBS News, was like asking the head of the Ku Klux Klan to comment on a lynching. Media Matters comments on the Randall Terry polemic by remembering a Leslie Stahl piece that links Terry directly to violence. Judith Warner’s column in yesterday’s New York Times is moving indeed.

Answered: A question I asked a couple of posts back has now been answered. The Obama administration is considering proposing legislation to allow five Guantanamo detainees to plead guilty to capital crimes. These five were allegedly involved in the 9/11 plot and have been extensively tortured and held without trial for many years. Today’s New York Times quotes David Glazier, who has written critically about the commission system in the past as saying: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.” But according to Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, a Guantanamo defense lawyer, the government is “trying to give the 9/11 guys what they want: let them plead guilty and get the death penalty and not have to have a trial.” These five detainees “have seemed to be daring the United States to put them to death,” according to New York Times reporter, William Glaberson.

Here’s the most interesting paragraph in Glaberson’s piece about this.

The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.

Interesting, because it suggests a program of leaks designed to contextualize whatever decision the administration finally takes about the Guantanamo detainees. There seem to be no good choices open. The matter of Guantanamo and the fates of the prisoners there is so seriously compromised by the depredations of the former administration that no actions remain that are simple, legal, or just.

after the speech

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I’ve just listened on CSPAN to the president’s May 21st speech about national security and the planned closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. I’m struck, upon hearing the speech entire, by its substance and seriousness. I’m now listening to Richard Cheney’s outrageous attack delivered immediately following the speech last Thursday. It seems clear that Republicans have made here the same sort of cynical political calculation they made about the stimulus package — oppose it and hope it fails.

But that calculation is less interesting than what seems to be the media determination to give the Republican search for a successful wedge issue equal time. The president has characterized the Republican attack as fear mongering. I think it goes far beyond that; it’s a mixture of fear mongering, hate mongering, nativism, and naked self-interest — I’m listening to Mitch McConnell smile his way through it now — and I don’t understand giving it the play it’s now being given on CSPAN, not to mention the sensational treatment it has been given by CNN and the other cable news outlets.

David D. Kirkpatrick and David M. Herszenhorn report in today’s New York Times that Republicans had planned the present concerted attack before the president’s inauguration. That’s useful knowledge. But these reporters’ conclusion that “Republicans have now beaten the Democrats twice on this issue in the last two years with overwhelming votes against transferring detainees to the United States,” says more about media cynicism than about anything else.

And there seems a constant stream of media “scrutiny” directed against the president’s popularity, such as the piece in this morning’s New York Times bearing the headline: Some Obama Enemies are Made Totally of Straw, presumably a news piece but remarkably long on assertion and short on evidence. The CSPAN piece I just listened to, the one that included Mitch McConnell’s enlightened critique, came down solidly on the side of “protecting the American people.” The moral argument about Guantanamo is now dismissed as a public relations argument designed to court favor in Europe. And the critique of the Bush administration’s lawless pursuit of presidential power is now obscured by the charge of phony moralism.

Of course the Clintons wrote the book on this strategy and gave it to the Republicans. Amongst the ranks of congressional Democrats, brave souls, who voted en masse to deprive the president of funds to close Guantanamo, there must be some who view the president’s popularity askance and would willingly see it diminished.