Month: February 2010

Really: this stunt is pathetic, demeaning and stupid – a disgrace to his office.

Bainbridge thinks that the GOP shouldn't participate (an idea the GOP establishment is considering):

The GOP Congressional delegation would be idiots to agree to serve as human stage props for a White House-controlled event that inevitably will be rigged against them. Especially because Obama is still more charismatic, smarter, and a better debater than just about anybody on the GOP side. Wrong but sharp.

But not showing up would make Obama's job easier. John Cole:

If they come, you can have the summit. If they don’t, then you can have the summit without them, and can use the time (as the camera pans over their empty seats) to promote the positive aspects of the current bill all while discussing the only GOP plan out there- the Paul Ryan bill. I’d suggest panning the room a good bit.

Continetti doesn't see the downside of going:

In my opinion, there's no harm in a televised discussion of health care reform. If Obama hasn't been able to convince the public his way is the right way by now, one more event won't make a difference. Nor will a single C-SPAN broadcast alter the political dynamic that is preventing Democrats from passing a final bill. What's more, Republicans will have an opportunity to present their ideas to lower the cost of individual health insurance and increase consumer choice.

My own view is that not showing up makes them look totally obstructionist and makes Obama look more responsible and presidential. Their base might like it, but Independents wouldn't.

Or here:

"About one thing I wish to be piercingly clear: I do not believe that Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite. No, it is more than a matter of my own belief. I know as an incontrovertible fact, based on my long acquaintance with him and his writings, that he is not an anti-Semite. Of course he is not an anti-Semite," – Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, April 25, 2008.

That was after almost all the citations he now quotes in his latest attack on yours truly.

A reader writes:

In regards to this reader's friend who doesn't understand why he should care about healthcare without a job, I think this represents in a nutshell the real failure of messaging of which the White House and the Congressional Democrats are guilty. In a country in which healthcare costs are rising rapidly, especially in the individual insurance market and in terms of costs passed on to the uninsured (and through them, via emergency rooms, the taxpayers) and healthcare is traditionally tied to unemployment, it is precisely someone without a job who should be concerned about healthcare.

Yes, obviously he should be concerned about getting a job. But the idea that someone who in unemployed would not give "two shits" about healthcare is somewhat astounding given that he is the precise target of many of the benefits in the healthcare bill – benefits that once COBRA runs out he would be very, very happy to have if he or a loved one gets sick. This is a point that needs to be made – and made loudly: unemployment doesn't just mean you don't have a job; it means you are thrown back on our national safety net. And the healthcare bill is intended to increase that safety net.

Another writes:

What a wonderful sentiment. Let's all abandon improving the situation in this country because we want to stomp our feet and pout. And whatever you do, do not piece together the fact that our healthcare problems are big obstacle to employers adding employees to their payrolls. Or consider the fact that he or she should still have access to coverage despite being unemployed. This could just as easily have been posted under Big-Babyism as it could have under View from the Recession.

MTV finally drops "Music Television" from its logo.

Friedersdorf notes that several Americans are already on a "kill or capture" list:

Insofar as I know, everyone on the current hit list is a terrorist bastard, and President Obama is almost certainly never going to become a tyrant. But neither is he going to fulfill what was his greatest promise: reasserting prudent limits on the presidency, an office just recently a heartbeat away from Dick Cheney. Is our current president unable to imagine a future Oval Office occupant he trusts even less? That this power helps us to eliminate a few dangerous men in the short term hardly justifies the imprudent folly of indulging an unchecked power so extreme it can only end in corruption.

He also points out that “no person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on confession in open Court,” according to the constitution. Greenwald grasps for a compromise:

It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn't it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue "assassination warrants" or "murder warrants" — a repugnant idea given that they're tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial — but isn't that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself?

Sargent has the goods.

LT Dan Choi is back on active duty. Congrats, my friend. Your courage has mattered.

Scott Lucas is tracking them:

What is harder to read, in part because of those fogged communications, are the preparations for the demonstrations. Is the claim of “3 million on the streets” — taken not from an opposition spokesperson but from a source inside Tehran’s police headquarters — best assessment, a bit of sensationalism, or even disinformation to set up a let-down when the crowds fall short of that number?

The LA Times blog, Babylon & Beyond, is also at the ready. More pre-2/11 junta awfulness reported here:

Reports have filtered out from across Iran of people being roused from their beds during midnight raids and disappearing into the penal system without an official word to family and friends, and of overcrowded jails and long stays in solitary confinement, according to human rights groups inside and outside Iran.

Though the government does not report the numbers of those arrested, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a group based in New York, calculated that in the past two months alone at least 1,000 people have been put in prison, many arrested under a blanket detention order issued in June that empowers the police to take anyone into custody for any reason.