Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder explains the reconciliation process whereby the Democrats can get around the filibuster:

[T]he threat of reconciliation is very likely just that — a threat. In theory, if enough senators are convinced that Harry Reid, Max Baucus and Conrad (who MUST agree to it, given his Budget Committee chairman's status) will use reconciliation to push through the health care "pay-fors," they'll give up the threat of a filibuster. Problem is, if the bill is discredited and unpopular, reconciliation may increase its illegitimacy in the eyes of the public, even though a majority of senators will have voted for it. This is one of those fairly icky contraptions you find in our republican form of democracy; a majority isn't a majority, and isn't even perceived to be a majority, until a supermajority can be found.

That said, Republicans who protest the reconciliation procedure ought to be ignored, especially if they happened to have voted for any number of reconciled bills over the years that have been somewhat extraneous to the process of getting a budget done. Judd Gregg protests too much. Reconciliation isn't "controversial." It's not a "nuclear option." It's another way of getting things done, one that still requires at least 50 votes (with the Vice President breaking the tie, if necessary.)

by Patrick Appel

Jeff Tietz wonders:

How do Afghani drug lords spend their absurd earnings? It’s an intermittently vexing problem. Control of the heroin trade is divided among about twenty drug lords, who split an annual take of (at least) several billion dollars. Afghanistan, though, has trouble absorbing spending on this order: The country’s per-capita GDP is $429, the lowest on the Asian continent. A world-class paucity prevails there—of luxuries to buy, professionals to employ, penthouse suites to reserve. The infrastructure situation makes leisure travel difficult. (There is  one golf course, the Kabul Golf Club, restored after the fall of the Taliban by its proprietors, who cleared landmines, Soviet tanks, and rocket launchers to make it playable. It’s a nine-holer.)

by Patrick Appel

by Conor Clarke

I admire a lot of Nat Hentoff's writing, but since his new column on the dangers of Obama's end-of-life counseling has been making the rounds on the interweb, I think it's important to call that column exactly what it is: a conspiracy-mongering piece of nonsense. As usual, a caveat applies: By linking to this column and considering its arguments, I do not mean to give anyone the impression that there is a reasonable debate or actual interpretive uncertainty here. There is not. Nat Hentoff's column makes a large (and I hope unintentional) factual error.

The error is this. On the purely voluntary end of life consultations in the House bill, Hentoff writes (channeling Charles Lane):

No, no, a thousand times no. The House version of the bill ensures the Medicare will cover up to one consultation every five years, but it makes no stipulation that "Obama's doctors" (whatever the hell that means) will "initiate these chats."

by Patrick Appel

The NYT's new At War blog has been updating this post on Afghan elections throughout the day:

As Reuters explains, Afghanistan will take weeks to count the ballots cast today — perhaps in part because the country’s Independent Election Commission distributed ballot boxes to hard to reach areas of the country using 3039 cars, 3 helicopters and 3171 donkeys, which all now have to make their way back to Kabul. Preliminary results won’t be announced until September 3 and final results come two weeks later. If no presidential candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the votes in the first round, there will be a second round run-off between the top two candidates, most likely on October 1.

by Patrick Appel

Nielson says internet coverage of the health care debate has increase 1000% during the last month.

by Conor Clarke

I am not an expert on polling and don't want to say too much about the substance of this new Rasmussen health-care poll — which finds relatively lackluster support for a bill that lacks a public option — except to observe that it's not exactly airtight for the polling company to compare a snapshot opinion of a hypothetical bill that lacks a public plan to a completely separate tracking question about the bill as it currently stands. But if that comparison tells us something meaningful, it should certainly affect the political calculus regarding whether or not the public plan remains in the bill.

Anyway, what I do think is interesting is how quickly some folks on the left are willing to feast on this poll as a vindication of the public plan. Here, for example, is Think Progress on the subject. But it's a poll from Rasmussen! And Rasmussen is a conservative polling company! And, indeed, it took about thirty seconds to dig up a couple of other Think Progress posts attacking previous Rasmussen polls as unfair and leading and biased in favor of conservatives. But now the shoe is on the other foot, a different ox is getting gored, pick your metaphor, etc.

by Patrick Appel

Julian Sanchez wants his death panel:

[It] would be nice to see both sides talking in a way that recognized that there’s no foreseeable health care system under which resources are infinite and people don’t die eventually.

Good luck.

by Conor Clarke

The Washington Post reports that Grand Poobah Charles Grassley says "the outpouring of anger at town hall meetings this month has fundamentally altered the nature of the debate and convinced him that lawmakers should consider drastically scaling back the scope of health-care reform." Grassley elaborates, via the Post:

I think it's worth mentioning that the Grassley theory of "the public" is pretty much the exact opposite of how American democracy is supposed to function. Famously, public representatives are supposed to distinguish between the "vicious arts" of faction (Madison's words) and the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community" (Hamilton's). Of course, it might be the case that protestors laying seige to Fort Grassley actually represent the aggregate interests of the public. But you won't find evidence for that conclusion at a townhall meeting.

On the other hand, there's a pretty interesting question about the nature of democracy here: Formal democracy measures only the number of preferences (tallying votes), and not the intensity of preferences (like passionate townhall protests) or the quality of preferences (like the opinion of some group of philosopher kings). But I'm going to go out on a limb and assume Senator Grassley is not asking those rich philosophical quesitons.

by Conor Clarke

You know the health-care debate is really sobering up when Mark Steyn suggests that private American insurers are what's standing between civilization and prescribing Viagra to convicted pedophiles. (In general, however, I strongly approve of headline puns.)