As the health care reform debate enters what appears to be the home stretch (albeit not for the first time), what Washington is offering us (the citizenry) boils down to a choice between bad and worse. The legislation now under consideration, both the Senate bill and the slight variation on same presented as “Obama’s bill,” is the end result of a process that has methodically stripped away almost everything that made this reform effort worth undertaking in the first place. They’ve thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.
Tags: Alan Grayson, Bart Stupak, Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, health care, insurance, Max Baucus, Obama, Pelosi, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate
Posts Tagged “Obama”And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure. New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted. I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful. To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time. Tags: 2009, 2010, climate, George W. Bush, government, internet, journalism, Mark Morford, media, Obama, progress, the future
Sep
18
2009
 
Laugh so you don’t weep (at the wingnut insanity)Posted by Chris J. Miller in Personal, Policy, PoliticsIn the midst of the cesspool of paranoia and paralogia into which the ranting right is dragging so much of our political discourse these days… the latest iterations thereof being the Fox-driven hypocritical demagoguery about ACORN, and (even worse) the WSJ’s incredible suggestion that this(!) of all things somehow merits a special prosecutor… …a reader comment about the latter on John Cole’s blog put it all into perspective in a way that can’t help but provoke a grin, and that definitely merits sharing:
Really, what more can be said? Tags: ACORN, conservatism, Obama So, where did I leave off?
…That’s right, there was a speech Wednesday night. A pretty significant one, in fact, for reasons I described at some length. What of it, then? I can’t deny that it was a very, very good speech. Rhetorically powerful. And yet, what it says about the direction of health care policy, and thus about Obama and the Democratic Party itself… still remains substantially up in the air. (Even as every pundit who can string three words together attempts to read the tea leaves and tell us otherwise.) I’ll try to avoid that kind of divination. But opinions? Analysis? I have those. Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, government, health care, insurance, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate
Sep
09
2009
Uncertainty, Obama, and the nagging voice of cynicismPosted by Chris J. Miller in Policy, PoliticsAugust is a strange season in politics. In the final weeks of summer last year, we had the incredible (and incredibly short-lived) public buzz surrounding Sarah Palin, before people realized she just used those glasses for looks, not reading. This year’s dog days brought us hordes of astroturf Teabagger Republicans demonstrating that they think public discourse boils down to “whoever shouts loudest wins.”
But Labor Day is behind us and silly season is over, and the president gave a major speech on health care tonight, and it’s time to take a serious look at where things stand. Tags: Democrats, Glenn Greenwald, health care, Obama, Paul Krugman, progressives, Rahm EmanuelThe CIA Inspector General’s report on U.S. torture of detainees was released this week (under court order, thanks to a diligent ACLU lawsuit, after five years hidden from public view). The timing dovetails with Attorney General Holder’s decision to launch an investigation of that torture (albeit a tightly constrained one). The conduct detailed in the report is barbaric and shameful, and the report moreover makes clear that it was of questionable effectiveness in gaining any useful intelligence information. Most of the media coverage has reflected this straightforward reality. Then there’s Fox News… Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, Obama, OLC memos, torture
Aug
06
2009
Some thoughts on health care and hypocrisyPosted by Chris J. Miller in Policy, PoliticsOne could go on at literally exhaustive length about the ins and outs of the current “health care debate” in Washington, but I’ll try to avoid that. The media and the blogosphere have provided a constant play-by-play in terms of both substantive policy and, even more, political strategy. (Jonathan Chait at TNR has been particularly diligent. Meanwhile, much of the MSM seems content merely ringing premature death-knells for reform.) Me, I’ll just try to provide a few observations from a mile-high view. Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, health care, House of Representatives, insurance, Medicare, Obama, Paul Krugman, Rahm Emanuel, Republicans, Senate
The New Republic isn’t the place to look for progressive opinion these days (especially on matter of foreign policy), but every once in a while it does offer a reminder of why it used to be considered a liberal magazine. Most recently, TNR’s Ed Kilgore produced quite possibly the best and most succinct summary to date of all the reasons the left has to be disappointed with the Obama administration, including a handy bulleted list.
I can’t really improve on it, so let me just quote the pertinent bits: Tags: Congress, Obama, primaries, progressives On June 12, even as the election in Iran was happening and sweeping everything else out of the news cycle (a subject on which much digital ink has been spilled, to which I have nothing to add except that it’s nice to see a population care enough about democracy to take to the streets over it; that Obama has been responding to the situation with admirable discretion; and that the conservatives criticizing him are idiots who understand nothing about public diplomacy and would probably still attack him if he released a statement celebrating motherhood and apple pie)… the Obama administration did something unfortunate that produced an incensed reaction from observers in the civil liberties and GLBT communities. Namely, the Department of Justice submitted a legal motion [pdf] putting this administration on the record defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and arguing to dismiss Smelt v. United States, the first same-sex-marriage related case to reach the federal courts. This isn’t about the merits of equal marriage per se (which Obama has long been on the record as opposing, unfortunately). It’s a challenge to the validity of DOMA, under which the federal government (and other states) are not obliged to recognize same-sex marriages that are legally constituted in states that allow them (as is the case with these plaintiffs)—never mind that pesky “full faith and credit” clause, among other Constitutional provisions. It is, in short, a law that formally enshrines discrimination. It was a bad law when Bill Clinton signed it, and it’s a worse one today now that the situation it contemplates is not merely hypothetical. And it’s a law that candidate Obama loudly opposed. Tags: Constitution, DOJ, DOMA, equal marriage, GLBT rights, Obama
May
24
2009
The politics of paranoia and paralogiaPosted by Chris J. Miller in Personal, Policy, PoliticsWhere did we leave off? I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight. Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… Thus: I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions: Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters? and, moreover, WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure? One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level. Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture |
|
I’ve sat back and haven’t posted a great deal in recent weeks (although it’s been impossible to avoid following the theater of it all). For one thing, there are better things to do when the weather is nice (not all that common a condition in Chicago). For another, there’s been a lot of justifiable uncertainty and skepticism developing among progressives about exactly where and how Obama and the Democratic party are willing to take a stand, and I’ve been genuinely unsure of my own assessment, wavering from cynicism to optimism sometimes on a daily basis.
Entries (RSS)